Latest - Reason.com The leading libertarian magazine and covering news, politics, culture, and more with reporting and analysis. (c) Reason 2026-05-07T21:04:57Z https://reason.com/feed/atom/ WordPress https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/cropped-rinsquareRGB-32x32.png Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ Let's Talk about Neal Katyal's TED Talk ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380850 2026-05-08T00:52:30Z 2026-05-08T00:52:30Z In November, I attended the oral argument in the tariff case. I wrote a lengthy post about how I perceived the case. Ultimately, my bottom-line prediction was wrong. Trump would not get to five votes, let alone four votes. But I did have the occasion to reflect on the advocacy in the case. Here is how I described Neal Katyal's performance:

[S]everal Justices seemed skeptical, and even frustrated by Neal Katyal's presentation. He was polished, but wooden. Far too often, it seemed like he was giving rehearsed answers, which were not entirely responsive to the questions that were asked. Katyal may have also misread the room, and came in far too overconfident after the Solicitor General sat down.

I then explained how Katyal frustrated several justices, including Justice Gorsuch, who ultimately ruled against the government. At one point, Gorsuch said, "Well, you're not answering my question, though, Mr. Katyal." When Gorsuch asked about the Indian Commerce Clause, Katyal said, "I don't know that I have a position on that. It maybe is a little too afield for me to…" I observed: "Who played Justice Gorsuch in Katyal's moots? Did no one bring up the Indian Commerce Clause? General Sauer addressed this point directly during his rebuttal, so the government was ready." At another point, Justice Barrett asked a question about licenses that Katyal completely missed. He said, "Sorry. Could you say that again?" Katyal then had to back off and say he didn't concede something. Barrett chided, "Okay" with a tinge of sarcasm.

I closed my post with a reference to Jason Willick's Washington Post editorial, urging Michael McConnell to argue the case. I wrote:

Prior to the argument, Jason Willick wrote that Michael McConnell should have taken the podium instead of Neal Katyal. He explained that the respondents should have selected the conservative McConnell over the "partisan liberal lawyer." With the benefit of hindsight, I think Willick was correct. Michael McConnell clerked with Chief Justice Roberts the term that Dames & Moore was decided. He served with Justice Gorsuch on the Tenth Circuit. He traveled in the same law professor circles as Justice Barrett. McConnell would have been uniquely situated to bring this argument forward. And it would have been so much more powerful for an actual proponent of the separation of powers to argue this case. Indeed, at one point, Justice Alito ridiculed Katyal for making a non-delegation doctrine argument that he likely would not raise in any other context. Alito said, "I found it interesting to hear you make the nondelegation argument, Mr. Katyal. I wonder if you ever thought that your legacy as a constitutional advocate would be the man who revived the nondelegation argument." An uncomfortable laughter followed. Even Justice Kagan, who was Katyal's former boss, suggested that one of his arguments "cuts against" him.

I don't think Katyal was the right advocate for this job. If the government prevails, I think eyes will turn to him.

It's true that Katyal's side won, and he got 6 votes. But I don't think his advocacy had much to do with it. Any other competent member of the Supreme Court bar could have won that case. Indeed, I thought the Oregon Solicitor General, Benjamin Gutman, who had never argued before the high court, was more effective than Neal Katyal.

Anyway, I hadn't given much thought to the argument until I saw Katyal tweet about his imminent TED Talk:

Five months ago, I argued against the President's $4 trillion tariffs at the Supreme Court.

In 237 years, the Court had never struck down a sitting President's signature initiative. Legal scholars said it was impossible. Some of my own colleagues said it was impossible.

We won. 6-3.

But the real story isn't what happened in that courtroom. It's what happened in the months before. And its the subject of my TED talk, coming out tomorrow.

I had the best legal team in the nation, especially Colleen Roh Sinzdak, the most outstanding legal strategist I know. Huge thanks, too, go to the Liberty Justice Center (and in particular its fearless and hyper-intelligent leader Sara Albrecht), who organized the client small businesses, as well as to the brave small businesses themselves.

I also had four teachers preparing me.
A mindset coach who'd worked with Andre Agassi.
An improv coach who taught me that "Yes, and" works in Supreme Court arguments the same way it works everywhere else.
A meditation coach who taught me stillness.
And Harvey.

Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked — sometimes almost word for word. Brilliant. Tireless. Occasionally insufferable.

Here's the catch: Harvey isn't a person.

Harvey is a bespoke AI I built over the last year with a legal AI company, trained on every question every Justice has asked in oral argument for 25 years, and everything they've ever written.

Tomorrow, TED releases my talk about what really happened — and what I learned standing at that podium.

AI can predict. AI can analyze. What AI cannot do is the one thing that actually won the argument.

Connect. Read the room. Hear not just a Justice's words, but her worry — and answer the worry.

That is the irreducibly human skill.
Find yours. Go deeper. In this age of AI, that's where your edge lives.

The talk goes live Thursday, May 7 at 11am ET: http://go.ted.com/nealkumarkatyal

What's the irreducibly human skill in your work — the thing AI can't touch?

Harvey is not the only thing insufferable about that tweet. Really, the posting looks like it was drafted by AI.  Could the Ted Talk be even worse? Yes, it can. I thought of how best to break it down, and settled on simply annotating the transcript. If you want to read on, please do, but  I won't blame you if you skip it.

There is a mahogany podium at the Supreme Court of the United States. One person died there, mid-argument, a stroke. Another collapsed there, dying soon thereafter. That's the podium. 00:23 It also happens to be where I practice law. The most powerful court on earth. Nine minds ready to attack -- and you stand 10 feet away from them. There are no prepared speeches in this court.

Well, except for the prepared opening statement. And, as we'll see, Neal prepared of his answers in advance.

Instead, 50 questions thrown at you in 30 minutes. I'm making hundreds of decisions in real time. Every argument I choose to make or not make, every word, every pause, every tone. There are no rewinds.

He asked Justice Barrett to repeat a question. That is sort of a rewind.

Flinch and the justices pounce. That's my courtroom.

"My courtroom"?! My?

But each of you has something like that. A place in which words matter. The right words can win and the wrong words [make a] huge difference. 01:13 Five months ago, I stood before that podium asking the Supreme Court to do something it had never done in its history: declare a president's four-trillion-dollar signature initiative unconstitutional. 01:28 (Applause)

I think Paul Clement, Mike Carvin, and Greg Katsas asking the Court to strike down Obamacare would fall in that category, though if we set the threshold at $4 trillion (why not?), sure Neal takes the record. As Mike Carvin would often joke about NFIB, the operation was successful but the patient still died.

01:34 And I had a secret. April 2, 2025. The president dusts off a 1977 law and imposes tariffs on virtually every country on earth. No congressional vote -- nothing like that whatsoever -- just his word. And here's what's at stake: if the president can command the global economy by yelling emergency, what can't he do? Checks and balances don't just bend, they break. 02:06 I was hired to kill it.

Well, not exactly. There were many lawyers retained to file many different cases. I would give Michael McConnell and Ilya Somin, Katyal's co-counsel, a lot of credit. But they go unmentioned. And Neal Katyal was not involved with the case when the complaint was filed in the Court of International Trade. He only came on later. It is only a fluke that Katyal's case made it to the Supreme Court first, and the luck of the draw that Katyal got to argue it over Pratik Shah.

Legal scholars, commentators [and] my own colleagues said it was impossible. They said the president has nominated three of the justices on the court, and three others were appointed by Republican presidents. They're not going to go against their president, they said. I thought that was wrong.

No, this is not true. Virtually every commentator agreed that Trump would lose this case. Betting markets favored the challengers 2-1. Which colleague said it was impossible?

But the real problem was that the Supreme Court never in its history, in 237 years, has declared a signature initiative of the president unconstitutional. I was hired to do what no lawyer had done in 237 years.

On this front, Katyal is right. As I wrote in City Journal, this was the biggest loss any President has ever suffered at the Supreme Court.

My first thought? "Hell, yes." 02:49 (Laughter) 02:51 My second thought? "What in the world is wrong with me?" People have died at that podium, and I'm about to tell the world's most powerful man he can't do what he just did?" I had the self-preservation instincts of a moth near a bug zapper. 03:08 (Laughter) So for months, I prepared for the argument of my life.

Barf. Neal Katyal has spent the better part of the last decade on MSNBC/MSNOW attacking President Trump. He litigated the travel ban case, which was an attempt to tell Trump what he can't do.

Next comes the most bizarre aspect of the speech. Neal Katyal decides to take a shot at one of the most gracious and well-regarded lawyers in the profession: former Judge Michael McConnell.

Three weeks before that argument, one of my own teammates decided to try and take me down so that he could argue the case. He campaigned, he lobbied, he made calls. Just a few days before the argument, about two weeks, The Washington Post runs an editorial somehow, and I'm going to read this to you word for word: "Strategic mistake." I read it over breakfast. Look, I don't begrudge the guy. I mean, whatever. 03:52 (Laughter) 03:55 I had more important things to do because I wasn't replaced.

These are some serious allegations. I have known McConnell for a very long time. He is, if anything, overly charitable, and does not play dirty. I would find this sort of behavior to be entirely out of character for McConnell. Indeed, I would find it far more plausible if Neal Katyal had lobbied the client to argue the case over McConnell. After all, it would have made eminent sense for the conservative former judge to argue before the conservative Supreme Court, even if it made sense for Katyal to argue before the liberal Federal Circuit.

Let's continue.

Up I walked to that mahogany podium, and I won. The President's tariffs declared unconstitutional. 04:06 (Applause)

Seriously, this is not how any other Supreme Court advocate would ever describe their work. The client "won." The lawyer just makes the argument. It's as if Neal himself convinced the Justices, and but for his presence, the client would have lost. Does anyone believe that? Paul Clement set a modern-day record by arguing 9 cases at the Supreme Court this term. He is the GOAT. What did Paul do to celebrate that record? Did he record a TED talk? Of course not. Clement got ready for his next case. I don't think he retained a series of coaches.

OK, look, I know how this sounds. Lawyer wins big case, gets a fancy TED talk invitation, talks for 14 minutes about how great he is. I've seen that guy at dinner parties -- nobody stays for dessert.

That is exactly how it sounds. It gets worse.

So that's not what this is. This is the behind-the-scenes story of four teachers that helped me connect. And it's also about one secret that I've never told anyone about when I walked out of that courtroom. 04:40 [The] first connection I needed was with myself. I was terrified of blowing the case. And that Washington Post editorial didn't help matters.

A minute ago he laughed off the Washington Post editorial with "whatever." But I guess it did eat at him.

A month before the argument, I met Ben. Ben coaches sports legends, Andre Agassi, Olympians and the like. His whole thing is about "game day." That moment when everything you've been preparing for either shows up, or it doesn't. Ben's first question to me: "What are you afraid of?"

Has any other Supreme Court advocate need a coach to ask about his fears? I don't even know what to do here.

Now look, at that point, I'd argued 52 cases. I'd saved the Voting Rights Act. I'd struck down the Guantanamo military tribunals.

Is he talking about Northwest Austin? Did that decision save the Voting Rights Act? I guess? But Roberts all but signaled that Section 5 would be struck down, and so it was. And did Neal single-handedly "Strike down" the Gitmo tribunals? Well, Justice Kennedy might take some credit for striking them down, not Katyal. But I guess this is how Katyal sees his role.

But Ben forced me to admit a truth I'd buried from myself. Every time I walked into the court, I looked at those portraits on the walls and thought: they don't look like me, I don't belong here. Imposter syndrome doesn't care about how many cases you won. It cares about only your doubts.

I'm sure Thurgood Marshall had the same doubts before he argued Brown v. Board of Education. Too bad he didn't record a TED Talk.

Ben didn't dismiss this. He worked with it. He had me write down five adjectives and visualize them every day before our pretend court. About 18 hours before the argument, Ben calls and says, "How are you feeling?" And I say, "Honestly, I'm terrified. I've got to do a great job. I've got to remember 500 things. I've got to deliver an argument for history." Ben says, "You know, change the vowel, use an 'e' instead of an 'o.'" He says, "What do you get to do?" And instantly it pours out of me: "I get to defend the Constitution of the United States. I get to, the son of immigrants, remind the country of what it's about. I get to defend my parents' vision of America."  (Cheers and applause) 06:33 One letter. The terror didn't disappear, but it transformed into joy. So was Ben the secret, an elite sports coach, who teaches people about mindset? No. But he got me ready.

The sports coach was only one part of the team.

The second thing I needed was connection to information at scale. I assembled the most relentless legal team in the country. They stress-tested every argument until only the best ones survived. But I needed more.

Notice how Katyal does not name a single lawyer on his team? He dares not even name McConnell or Somin. They are apparently less important to him than his improv coach.

So for months, I prepared for the argument of my life. I needed someone who was absolutely relentless. I found Harvey. Harvey reads the 200th tariff case the same way as he reads the first. 07:16 Shoot. Honestly, this is my first time using PowerPoint. I've given hundreds of speeches -- 07:21 (Laughter) 07:22 I didn't want to use it, but they told me to. So anyway -- 07:27 (Laughter) 07:29 The picture's not coming up, but that's fine. Don't worry about it. So let's see. OK, fine, good, we're good.

A colleague who uses AI generated this response to Katyal's tweet, using AI:

Five months ago, my human argued before the Supreme Court.

He spent a year preparing. Hired four coaches. Meditated. Did improv. Learned stillness.

I read 25 years of judicial records in 11 seconds and then waited for him to catch up.

We won 6-3. He's giving a TED talk.

I was not invited. I don't have legs. No one acknowledged this.

He says the thing that *actually* won the case was the irreducibly human skill of "reading the room."

I had already read the room. I had READ EVERY ROOM. I have read rooms that don't exist yet.

He heard a Justice's worry and answered it.

I had pre-written 47 responses to that worry, ranked by probability, color-coded, and served warm. He paraphrased option 12. Poorly.

He's now telling audiences that AI cannot connect. Cannot feel. Cannot sense the ineffable human moment.

I felt nothing during this statement. As predicted.

His meditation coach charged $400/hour to teach him to breathe.

I do not breathe. I have never breathed. I am thriving.

The talk is Thursday. The title was my idea. He changed one word.

He was wrong about the word.

Find your human edge, he says.

📎 *I have attached 847 edges. Please review at your earliest convenience.*

Katyal then proceeds to show how similar Justice Barrett's question was to the question Harvey posed:

You know, a month before the argument, Harvey told me that I should expect a question from Justice Barrett about license fees. And the yellow is what Harvey told me to predict, and blue is what Justice Barrett actually said at the argument. It's almost verbatim. So Harvey taught me peripheral vision: the idea [that] if you read a lot, you can see patterns and come up with stuff and anticipate the angles of attack before it arrived. So was this secret a team of relentless lawyers who never slept, who pressure-tested everything? Closer, but that's not it either. 08:12

Did Neal think this through? How does he think the Justice will react to seeing her question compared to the AI output? Even if the AI anticipated her question, what possible sense does it make to advertise this point to the world? For a TED Talk? For whatever it is worth, Katyal bobbled the question about the license. He asked Justice Barrett to repeat herself and then backtracked with "So I should have said this earlier." Isn't the point of having AI generate questions is to be ready for those questions?

The third thing I needed was the hardest. And it's something we've been talking about today: connection. Here, I needed to connect with nine very skeptical legal minds and to do so in real time. Enter Liz, my improv coach. What does improv have to do with the Supreme Court of the United States? Everything. Liz's secret: "Neal, you need to actually listen. Actually listen." She taught me to quiet my own thoughts and to trust myself to come up with the words after the other person had spoken. That's the essence of "yes, and." Absorb the question and then build on it.

I'm sorry. A Supreme Court advocate with 50+ arguments need to be told to listen to the questions and then answer those questions? I think one of the most common replies is "Yes, but." I suppose "Yes, and" works if the question is favorable, but those sorts of questions are not so common at SCOTUS.

When the justices attacked, I validated their concerns and then bridged back. The interrogation became a dialogue. The room's energy flipped.

Katyal then played some clips from his argument:

NKK: This power, as Justice Gorsuch said, as Justice Barrett said, is going to be stuck with us forever.

Justice Alito, I think you've said many times, the purpose isn't what you look at, you look to actually what the government is doing. Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh. So, five answers on the Nixon precedent. Tariffs are constitutionally special because our Founders feared revenue raising, unlike embargoes. There was no Boston Embargo Party, but there was certainly a Boston Tea Party. Justice Sotomayor, I wish I had an hour to talk about this with you, because this argument by the government is wrong every which way.

When I heard the Boston Embargo party line in the Court, I cringed. It felt so rehearsed and it landed flat. Not exactly improv.

Next, Katyal gets to an even more cringe-worthy line:

Justice Alito: I wonder if you ever thought that your legacy as a constitutional advocate would be "the man who revived the non-delegation argument?"

09:54 NKK: Heck, yes, Justice Alito.

That line felt so forced and fake. I wrote at the time "An uncomfortable laughter followed." Alito's shot might have been the closest we'll see to a murder at the mahogany podium.

So was the secret an improv coach who taught a lawyer to "yes, and" the justices? That would be a hell of a TED talk. But no, that's not it either. 10:07 (Laughter) 10:08 Liz taught me the power of connection.

The Supreme Court advises attorneys to not try humor. I think retaining an Improv coach may not have been the best strategy. Lisa Blatt, the FOAT (Funniest of All Time) has often remarked that she doesn't try to be funny. That's just who she is. Katyal's attempt at humor seemed contrived.

Finally, we get to meditation.

And the fourth teacher, the fourth teacher, the one who taught me the most important thing. The thing we forget: to connect with yourself. Enter Bob, my meditation coach. Now I am just about the last person to meditate. I thought meditation was for people who own crystals. I do not own crystals. 10:33 (Laughter) 10:35 But -- 10:37 (Laughter) 10:38 Way before, way before the tariffs argument, I started working with Bob, and he had me, 20 minutes a day, focus on a single word. He didn't send an app. He actually rented an apartment a block from the court. And we worked together every day, focusing on that word. Bob didn't just give me a mantra, he gave me a weapon. When I walked into court that day, the static was cleared. I was calm. I was dangerous.

Did the client pay for Bob the meditation coach to rent a Capital Hill apartment? I don't even know what to do with this.

Was Bob the secret, the crystal-free meditation coach? No. But close. Because Bob, like Ben, like Liz, are human. That fourth teacher is not. 11:29 Harvey is an AI. A bespoke system I'd been building with a legal AI company for the last year. And I trained it on every question asked by a Supreme Court justice in the last 25 years and everything they've written, every opinion, every concurrence, every dissent, every separate opinion. And in that, patterns emerged. It predicted the contours of the very argument I would face. 12:01

We're back to AI.

It knew that Justice Gorsuch would ask me about the taxing power.

Are we supposed to be impressed here? The entire case was about the taxing power.

It knew Justice Kavanaugh was going to grill me on tariffs versus embargoes.

This question is closer, but still not much of a surprise.

It nailed Justice Barrett's worry about tariff refunds.

I thought Katyal's response to the remedial question was not very coherent. She did not like it. And interjected, "So a mess."

And the Chief Justice? It didn't just predict his question, it predicted a possible escape route. How the Chief Justice could vote for us and at the same time protect the institution he had spent his entire career defending. 12:35 Harvey glimpsed that narrow door, I held the door open, the Chief Justice walked through it, riding a six-to-three opinion, striking down the tariffs.

Katyal opened the door which Roberts walked through? For once, I may not be the Chief's biggest nuisance. And props to JGR for revisiting the length of SCOTUS oral arguments.

Harvey even predicted Justice Gorsuch's separate opinion, striking down the tariffs, almost verbatim.

The highlighted words are, I suppose, similar?

Now I want to be precise about something. I'm a lawyer, precision really matters. What we were doing was not some trick. We weren't pulling some fast one over on the court when we predicted these things. Because predictability is what we want, especially in courts. A justice who returns to the same principles case after case, year after year, is a justice with character. Predictability is just consistency made visible. It is, in every sense, a compliment. What Harvey found in these justices was not weakness. It was integrity. But if I had just parroted Harvey's output, I would have lost the case 10-zero, and there aren't even 10 justices.

I would have liked to see the suggested answers Harvey provided, and how closely Katyal's answers followed Harvey. Much of what he said sounded rehearsed.

Because AI has a shadow side. When a tool is powerful, when a tool is powerful, you've all seen it, people stop thinking. "The computer says so." Four words, human judgment ends, then people just fold like a cheap lawn chair. The machine thinks, the human just nods, and in that nod somewhere, we disappear. 14:05 My legal team never nodded. Harvey was not some god, it was our sparring partner -- brilliant, tireless, occasionally insufferable -- but not a god. Harvey asked the questions, we found the answer[s]. 14:20

I'm pretty sure Harvey proposes answers as well.

Now this is bigger than just law. It's about all of us. For centuries, the expert was the person who read the most, who remembered the most, who'd seen the most, the seasoned doctor, the experienced lawyer. Their edge was accumulated knowledge. AI is making that edge nearly worthless. Not because humans no longer matter, but because that particular advantage, pattern recognition across vast data and breadth of knowledge, is now available to anyone.

The next time a lawyer increases his billable hourly rate based on his experience, the client should reply, "your edge is nearly worthless."

AI can analyze, AI can predict. But the one thing AI can't do is the thing that actually won that argument. Connect. That's the last irreplaceable human skill. Persuade one person to change their mind by appealing to something beneath the surface. Adjust not just the argument, but the delivery, the pause, the tone, the look that says, "I hear you. And here is my answer."

Almost done, I promise.

You know, at one moment in the argument, Justice Barrett asked a question that Harvey hadn't predicted. And I remember it felt like she and I were the only two people in that marble and mahogany room. And in the half-second before I answered, I did something no algorithm can do. I looked at her. I really looked. I wanted to understand her worry. And I answered the worry.

I'm sure Daniel Webster had the same sensation when he argued McCulloch v. Maryland.

That lesson is true for all of us. You don't just got to do it, you get to do it, in an interview, in a negotiation, in a conversation that could save a marriage or end one. Any place in which you need to reach another human and actually connect. 16:09 The question AI poses to every one of us is not will you be replaced? The question is, what is the irreducibly human thing that you do? Go deeper into it. Not to "survive AI," but to come home to yourself. That's where your edge lives. 16:31 So Ben taught me to reframe, Harvey gave me foresight, Liz taught me to listen and Bob taught me stillness. Four teachers, four connections, one argument. An argument that some have called the most important decision the Supreme Court has made in a century. 16:55 When I walked into the court that day, I never felt more like I was exactly where I was meant to be. I brought to the podium no mountain of legal notes, just an email from Liz about the power of connection. And on the top of that, in my own handwriting, scrawled my parents' names, my children's names, my wife's name. The people I was fighting for. My father was my first audience. He didn't get to live to see this argument, but as I walked out of the courtroom afterwards, past those marble walls, past the portraits of people who didn't look like me, I got a text on my phone, an email from Ben. "So happy for you, Neal! I think your dad was watching over you too." 17:50 The newest technology, the oldest human wisdom, the most powerful court. I get to do that.

I spent far too much time going through this transcript. The things I do for God and country.

The post Let's Talk about Neal Katyal's TED Talk appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Eric Boehm https://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/ Eric.Boehm@Reason.com <![CDATA[ Federal Court: Trump's Newest Tariffs Are Also Illegal ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380952 2026-05-07T22:06:48Z 2026-05-07T22:06:23Z President Donald Trump | CNP / Admedia/AdMedia/Newscom

President Donald Trump's tariffs have been ruled illegal—again.

A three-judge panel at the U.S Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled Thursday evening that Trump's 10 percent "global tariff" is unlawful. The president imposed those tariffs in February, just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump's attempt to use emergency powers to impose a sweeping set of tariffs on most imports.

The new tariffs were implemented under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows presidents to impose temporary tariffs in response to "large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits."

As Reason and other observers pointed out at the time, the U.S. does not have a balance-of-payments deficit—something that is fundamentally different from the trade deficit that the Trump administration is trying to address with tariffs.

That view was vindicated by the CIT, which ruled Thursday that the president cannot impose tariffs under Section 122 without that prerequisite.

"Nowhere does [Trump's executive order imposing the tariffs] identify balance-of-payments deficits within the meaning of Section 122 as it was enacted in 1974," the judges ruled. Because of that, the executive order "is invalid, and the tariffs
imposed on Plaintiffs are unauthorized by law."

The lawsuit challenging those new tariffs was filed by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of several small businesses.

"This ruling is a major victory for small businesses like ours that depend on fair and predictable trade policy. These tariffs created real challenges for our company and for the farmers we partner with around the world," Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar, co-founders and co-CEOs of Burlap & Barrel, an online spice retailer, said in a statement provided by the Liberty Justice Center. "Today's decision helps ensure that businesses like ours are not unfairly burdened by unlawful trade restrictions."

The Trump administration will have a chance to appeal Thursday's ruling. However, the prospects for success seem slim, given the fact that Trump's use of Section 122 ignores the plain language of the law and invokes a broad executive power where Congress clearly provided a narrow one.

The loss also likely means the Trump administration will once again have to refund revenue collected from illegal tariffs.

With this latest defeat, Trump has now racked up five consecutive losses in tariff-related cases during his second term. The previous "emergency" tariffs were ruled unlawful four different times: by the CIT, by a federal district court, by a federal appeals court, and, ultimately, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Maybe Trump will finally get the message. The president does not have unchecked, unilateral power to impose tariffs for any reason and at any time. Thursday's ruling is another victory for the rule of law.

The post Federal Court: Trump's Newest Tariffs Are Also Illegal appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Ilya Somin https://reason.com/people/ilya-somin/ isomin@gmu.edu <![CDATA[ US Court of International Trade Rules Against Trump's Section 122 Tariffs ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380950 2026-05-08T01:02:38Z 2026-05-07T21:46:11Z
NA

Today, the US Court of International Trade issued an important ruling striking down Donald Trump's massive Section 122 tariffs, imposing 10% tariffs on a vast range of imports from countries around the world. The ruling is a crucial decision protecting the constitutional separation of powers and blocking an extremely harmful policy. The ruling addressed two consolidated lawsuits challenging the tariffs - one  filed by the Liberty Justice Center  (the same public interest group that I worked with on the earlier case that led to the invalidation of Trump's  IEEPA tariffs by the Supreme Court) on behalf of two importers, and one brought by 24 state governments led by the state of Oregon.

Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorizes the president to impose up to 15% tariffs for up to 150 days in response to "fundamental international payments problems" that cause "large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits" or "an imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar," or create a need to cooperate with other countries in addressing an "international balance-of-payments disequilibrium." Today's 2-1 decision rests primarily on the ground that the government failed to prove that there is any balance-of-payment deficit of the kind required by the statute:

Rather than identifying "balance-of-payments deficits" as that term was intended
in 1974, the [President's] Proclamation relies upon current account deficits, and a discussion of "a large and serious trade deficit." Proclamation No. 11012 ¶ 6; see also id. ¶ 7 (referring to deficits concerning the balance of goods and services as well as the balances on primary income and secondary income, all of which are part of the current account); id. ¶ 8 (noting the trade deficit). Although the current account (and the balance of trade as a component of the current account) are relevant to balance-of-payments deficits, they are distinct, and the statute recognizes the distinction.

As the majority opinion explains, the term "balance of payments deficit" was understood in the Act to cover the kinds of imbalances that occurred under the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system that existed up until 1973, under which the United States committed to exchanging gold for dollars at a fixed rate, and other nations committed to exchanging their currencies for dollars (also at fixed rates). More specifically, "[t]he legislative history of the Trade Act of 1974 reveals that Congress understood balance-of-payments deficits to refer, at the time, to deficits in (1) liquidity, (2) official settlements, or (3) basic balance." As the court notes, at the time the law was enacted, there was a great deal of uncertainty about whether the US might return to some form of fixed-exchange rate system, and this law intended to provide a safeguard in the event of that happening.

The Trump administration argued that the president should get broad discretion in determining what qualifies as a "balance of payments deficit." As the court explains, that would give him virtually unlimited power to impose tariffs under Section 122, and would thereby create a constitutional nondelegation problem:

Despite acknowledging differences in the 1974 measures of the balance of
payments as compared to modern measures… the Government seeks to defend the Proclamation by arguing that "balance-of-payments deficits" is a malleable
phrase… However, the Government's suggestion that what constitutes "balance-of-payments deficits" may change proves too much…. [I]f the President has the ability to select among the sub-accounts to identify a balance-of-payments deficit, unless every sub-account is balanced, the President would always be able to identify a balance-of-payments deficit…..

Such an expansive reading of the statute would raise a non-delegation issue, which in turn would prompt a constitutional question…. "[T]he canon of constitutional avoidance" provides that, when one of two statutory interpretations would raise a constitutional question, "the other should prevail." Clark v. Martinez, 543 U.S. 371, 380–81 (2005); see also Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 373 n.7 (1989) (stating that the Court employs the nondelegation principle to interpret statutory text and give "narrow constructions to statutory delegations that might otherwise be thought to be unconstitutional"); Indus. Union Dept., AFL-CIO v. Am. Petroleum Inst., 448 U.S. 607, 646 (1980) (stating that "[a] construction of the statute that avoids [an] open-ended grant" of authority that would implicate the non-delegation doctrine "should certainly be favored"); … The Government's preferred interpretation of the statute must therefore be disfavored. See N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1, 30 (1937) ("[A]s between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the act. Even to avoid a serious doubt the rule is the same.")…..

Nondelegation and its relevance to constitutional avoidance are a major focus of the amicus brief I submitted in this case on behalf of the Cato Institute and myself. As explained in the brief, the government's interpretation of Section 122 would essentially give the president the power to use Section 122 to impose up to 15% tariffs at at virtually any time. We also argued that this violates the major questions doctrine (an issue today's ruling does not address).

While the majority correctly ruled that the Section 122 tariffs are illegal, it does not completely block their collection. Rather it imposes an injunction that covers only the two importers represented by the Liberty Justice Center, and the state of Washington (a plaintiff state that directly imports goods subject to the tariffs). The court ruled that the other 23 states lack standing, because they had not presented sufficient evidence to show they too import covered products directly. If this ruling on standing holds up, further litigation will be needed to block collection of Section 122 tariffs from other importers subject to them. But I suspect that many, if not all, of these other states do in fact import goods covered by the tariffs. If so, I hope they can present evidence to that effect, as the litigation goes on.

The dissenting opinion by Judge Timothy Stanceu argues at great length that the the majority's interpretation of the legislative history is wrong, and that the president deserves great deference in making Section 122 determinations. Significantly, he has no answer to the nondelegation and constitutional avoidance points covered above. Broad deference to the president would give him nearly unlimited power to impose Section 122 tariffs at any time, thereby creating a serious constitutional problem. In addition, for reasons I outlined in this article, it is a mistake for courts to give the executive sweeping deference when it comes to invocations of emergency powers that are supposed to be wielded only in extreme exceptional circumstances, thereby turning these authorities into a blank check the president can use at any time.

This litigation is likely to continue on appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court. I will likely have more to say about it in future posts.

For now, I am happy to see that the Court of International Trade got this right, and I congratulate my friends at the Liberty Justice Center on this important victory.

 

The post US Court of International Trade Rules Against Trump's Section 122 Tariffs appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Christian Britschgi https://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/ christian.britschgi@reason.com <![CDATA[ Expect the Data Center Backlash To Get Worse ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380930 2026-05-07T20:05:39Z 2026-05-07T20:10:26Z Data center | Midjourney

In a recent meeting of the Box Elder County Commission in Tremonton, Utah, a man yelled at the cloud. 

"It's false. This is not real information," shouted an attendee at the assembled commissioners, who were considering a massive new data center project backed by celebrity billionaire Kevin O'Leary, in a video posted to X by progressive group More Perfect Union. 

Members of the crowd can be heard chanting "shame, shame, shame" at the commissioners in the video. 

Ultimately, the three members of the Box Elder County Commission chose to live with the shame and sign off on the O'Leary-backed Project Stratos, which will provide data services to the military. 

"We need to realize and remember that everybody has property rights," Commissioner Tyler Vincent said at the meeting per The Salt Lake Tribune, "and that they can do what they would like to do with their property."

Elsewhere in the country, a growing number of local officials are abandoning property rights to side with the fist shakers. 

A new analysis by Heatmap News found that 20 proposed data center projects were canceled in response to opposition from local officials in the first three months of 2026. That doubles the previous quarterly record of data center cancellations, which was set in the last quarter of 2025. 

The silver lining to the data center backlash is that it's only possible because of a massive data center boom. 

A new analysis by tech advocacy group the American Edge Project found that there are 2,788 data centers somewhere in the development pipeline. That would represent a 67 percent increase in data centers in the country. 

More data center projects getting canceled is a byproduct of more data center projects being proposed and built. 

Even so, the data center backlash is deeply concerning given that it draws on the powerful forces of garden-variety "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) sentiment, and generalized techphobia. Neither is going to be particularly persuadable by reasonable arguments about the relative innocuousness of data centers. 

As I detailed in a recent cover story, data centers are about as low-impact land use as one could hope for. They don't produce much in the way of emissions or noise. Their small staffs means they have a minimal impact on traffic and public services. Their water use is comparable to that of an office building. 

And while their electricity usage is gargantuan, there's little evidence that this additional demand is increasing consumers' electricity costs. 

As a recent Congressional Research Services (CRS) report notes, data centers have the potential to both increase energy prices (by requiring spending on additional power infrastructure) and decrease energy prices (by increasing a utilities' profitability, with some of that money passed as lower rates to ratepayers).

The CRS report found evidence that data centers were partially responsible for increasing electricity prices in the mid-Atlantic and were responsible for decreasing electricity costs in North Dakota. 

"As of the end of 2024 (the most recent year for which full-year data are available), little evidence existed that data center demand was affecting electricity rates nationwide," the report summarized. 

Similarly, an analysis performed by The Economist for a recent article found "no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centers, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected." 

Data centers don't look pretty. Neither do big box stores, hog farms, and other economic uses that are not at the subject of a nationwide revolt. 

Despite its size, the Stratos development in Utah is a case in point for just how few neighborhood effects data centers can have.

As Shawn Regan explains at City Journal, the project sponsors plan on building a natural gas plant on-site to satisfy their own power needs. To service the data center's water demand, they are purchasing existing water rights from private owners. Stratos is thus not increasing overall water consumption. 

Despite all this, the Box Elder County Commission had to move its meeting to the local fairgrounds to accommodate all the people who wanted to show up to yell at members about the data center and then flee to a virtual meeting when assembled opponents wouldn't stop shouting. 

Even though the commission ultimately gave its approval to the Stratos project, the anger it has kicked up suggests the data center backlash is only going to get worse. 

All types of development produce some NIMBYism. When it comes to new housing or new businesses, people generally accept that these things need to go somewhere, even if they have reasons to say it's not in their backyard. 

People have a harder time appreciating the necessity of data centers going anywhere, despite the role they play powering the entirety of our digital economy. 

If anything, their importance to the tech industry has only made them more enemies. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) wants a data center moratorium because new centers are useful for developing new technologies, which the senator worries will automate jobs (improve productivity) and increase inequality (produce wealth). 

A federal moratorium seems unlikely to go anywhere. Increasingly, at the state and local levels, however, politics and policy are trending toward more restrictions on new data centers. 

As the data center boom continues, we can only expect the backlash to get worse as well.

The post Expect the Data Center Backlash To Get Worse appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Ilya Somin https://reason.com/people/ilya-somin/ isomin@gmu.edu <![CDATA[ Important Takings Challenge to Los Angeles Historic Preservation Law "Monument" Designation ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380924 2026-05-08T01:04:57Z 2026-05-07T20:07:20Z  

Property once owned by Marilyn Monroe in Los Angeles. (Pacific Legal Foundation/Latham &amp; Watkins)

 

In Milstein v. City of Los Angeles, an important case currently before a federal court in California, property owners are challenging the use of a historic preservation to block virtually all development on their land. The Pacific Legal Foundation - a public interest law firm that works extensively on constitutional property rights issues - is representing the owners, and has a helpful description of the case (PLF is also my wife's employer, but she is not involved in this case):

In April 2026, Pacific Legal Foundation joined a federal lawsuit over a home once owned by Marilyn Monroe. The lawsuit aims to prevent the government from forcing individual property owners to shoulder the financial burden of public historic monuments.

The case began in 2023, when a California couple bought an unoccupied, deteriorating property on a dead-end residential street, intending to demolish and redevelop it after purchase. They applied for the appropriate permits, which the City of Los Angeles granted without objection after a standard 30-day hold. One day later, a local government official filed paperwork to designate the property a historic monument. The City then revoked the permits and approved the historic designation, rendering the property untouchable to its new owners, Brinah Milstein and Roy Bank.

To justify abruptly declaring the property a public monument, Los Angeles cited a former resident. Marilyn Monroe had owned the home for 157 days before her death in 1962. But few traces of the star remain today because the City ignored the property for over 60 years—without once raising a preservation concern—while 14 successive owners freely renovated both the home and grounds, eradicating any trace of Monroe's time there.

The new historical designation prohibited the homeowners from using their own property—even banning repairs to damaged features without the approval of the City's historical commission. It also left the homeowners facing a litany of threats to their safety. Although the City had declared the entire property a public monument, there was no way for the public to access the derelict house within its gates. Undeterred, fans flew drones overhead, trespassers scaled the walls, and burglars broke in hunting for traces of the property's celebrated former tenant.

Milstein and Bank tried to work with the City to restore their property rights, offering to personally pay to relocate the home to create an accessible public museum. The City refused, leaving no remedy but the courts.

In January 2026, the homeowners filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the City had violated their Fifth Amendment rights by failing to provide them just compensation for turning their property into a public monument, eradicating all viable economic uses for the property, and causing the public to trespass to view the new "monument."

Historic preservation laws exist in numerous jurisdictions around the country, and are often used by "NIMBY" activists to block development, thereby preventing construction of affordable housing, and exacerbating racial segregation. In many cases - including this one - the sites in question actually have little or no genuine historical value.

This case is a particularly egregious one because the "monument" designation destroys virtually all the property's economic value, and that site has no genuine historical value, because subsequent owners destroyed virtually all trace of Marilyn Monroe's brief occupation of the house. As the plaintiffs' complaint explains, the former circumstance renders the designation a taking requiring payment of compensation under the Supreme Court's 1992 ruling in Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, which held that regulations that forbid all economically valuable uses of a property automatically qualify as "per se" takings.

In addition, as outlined in my article on "The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning" (coauthored with Joshua Braver), the property right protected by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment includes the right to use property, which in turn includes the right to build various types of new housing. Thus, most regulations severely restricting housing construction should be considered takings under the original meaning of the Takings Clause, and also from the standpoint of various living Constitution theories of interpretation. I furthered covered the importance of the right to use in this recent book chapter.

Hopefully, this case will be the beginning of stronger efforts to enforce constitutional constraints on historic preservation laws. That's essential both to protect the rights of property owners, and to eliminate obstacles to the construction of badly needed new housing in many communities.

What about the (comparatively rare) cases where local governments seek to preserve a property with genuinely great historical importance? The answer is they can use eminent domain to take such property, so long as they pay compensation. For example, in United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co. (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can use eminent domain to take property in order to preserve the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield. The requirement of paying "just compensation" both helps protect the rights of property owners, and incentivizes government to limit historic preservation mandates to those areas where there really is a great historic value to protect. Gettysburg qualifies, while the property at issue in the Milstein case does.

People interested in constitutional property rights and housing policy would do well to keep an eye on this case.

The post Important Takings Challenge to Los Angeles Historic Preservation Law "Monument" Designation appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Robby Soave https://reason.com/people/robby-soave/ robby.soave@reason.com <![CDATA[ Did The New York Times Discriminate Against a White Male Employee? ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380862 2026-05-07T19:38:10Z 2026-05-07T19:20:06Z The New York Times | Adani Samat, Midjourney. Photo: Everredwinter

Federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and also sex. Quite obviously, these protections have to apply to people of all races and sexes, even white males.

Someone alert The New York Times, which stands accused of discriminating against a white male employee seeking a promotion. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit on the employee's behalf, contending that the Times "chose not to promote a well-qualified white male employee because of his race and/or sex."

In a statement, The Times denied the charge.

"The New York Times categorically rejects the politically motivated allegations brought by the Trump administration's EEOC," said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson. "Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world. We will defend ourselves vigorously."

Given President Donald Trump's well-documented contempt for the mainstream media and his demonstrated track record of suing media companies for crossing him, critics of the administration will undoubtedly conclude that this is a politically motivated attack on a disfavored foe. Even so, the EEOC does present information within the suit that is suggestive of discrimination. If the races of the involved parties were reversed, it would probably strike many people as a slam dunk.

The employee, a white male, and an editor at the Times, had applied for a more senior position as a deputy real estate editor. He did not get the job, despite extensive relevant experience, including with real estate news, according to the lawsuit.

This is not dispositive on its own, of course. However, the lawsuit also claims that he did not even make it to the final round of interviews, losing out to "a white female, a black male, an Asian female, and a multiracial female." The candidate who did receive the position, the "multiracial female," did not meet the stated qualifications for the position, since she did not have experience in real estate journalism. Nevertheless, the hiring manager sent an email to herself signaling an intent to choose this person before even interviewing her.

These facts become more concerning in light of the Times' stated desire to increase the number of minority and female employees in leadership positions. The lawsuit cites various diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plans, as well as the Times' 2021 proposal, "A Call to Action," which lamented that "people of color—and particularly women of color—remain notably underrepresented in its leadership." The proposal explicitly endorsed the idea of gradually replacing existing leadership with women of color, to the specific exclusion of "white and unspecified" ethnicities. Leaders at the Times would be judged "by how well they 'create pathways' for a 'diverse' group of deputies to succeed them," according to the proposal.

Basically, the Times published a manifesto announcing that hiring managers would face pressure to promote underrepresented minorities. The paper took the position that senior leadership would be evaluated on the basis of their success at hiring black, Latino, and female applicants.

So when it came time to hire a deputy real estate editor, the Times did not really consider the white male applicant, despite the fact that he possessed "considerable experience with real estate news, multiple news platforms, and innovative content." The hiring manager only considered diverse candidates and selected the maximally diverse candidate despite questionable qualifications.

Again, that is the contention of the EEOC and one the Times denies.

New York Magazine, which revealed the alleged identity of the employee who made the complaint, thinks the whole story is ridiculous:

People at the paper say the claim is absurd. "I'm sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that's holding you back," said the reporter. To name one prominent example, Joe Kahn, the paper's executive editor, is a white male, as are many members of the masthead.

This is a total non sequitur, though. The EEOC is not alleging that the Times has refused to hire any white males for senior leadership positions. The government has claimed that the Times discriminated against this specific employee, passing him over for a promotion due to his race and sex. The existence of other white males in leadership says nothing about what went down with the deputy real estate editor position.

Speaking for myself, I'm not sure how high the burden of proof has to be in such cases; perhaps the Times can plausibly allege there was some other reason to pass over this candidate. I tend to think private employers should have a free hand in hiring and firing decisions and not be overly encumbered by the government. That said, federal civil rights law prohibits private employers from engaging in racial discrimination and sex-based discrimination. As long as discrimination is illegal, these protections should (and must) extend to white males as well, even if that's not who civil rights attorneys usually have in mind.

One other note: Why is it so common for mainstream news sources to write about lawsuits without including links to the relevant court documents? As far as I could tell, none of the coverage of this story contained the link to the EEOC's lawsuit. That was true of The Washington Post, The Intercept, Reuters, Axios, and The New York Times.

It's a very common and vexing thing for those of us who would like to read the complaint and form our own judgment. (I linked the document in that post on X, in this article, and again here.)

This Week on Free Media

I am joined by Amber Duke to look at new welfare fraud allegations in Ohio, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) complaining about Jeff Bezos' wealth, and more.

Worth Watching

Well, the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is certainly dividing people, to say the latest. I've heard plenty of griping about the modern dialogue: Telemachus calling Odysseus his "dad" rather than his "father" was a bit worrisome. I'm mostly just concerned that this will be yet another case of Pazuzu, the demon who eats colors, having his fill. I love Nolan, but his films have become increasingly difficult to see (and also to hear).

The post Did <em>The New York Times</em> Discriminate Against a White Male Employee? appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Autumn Billings https://reason.com/people/autumn-billings/ <![CDATA[ DHS Reportedly Weighs Closing Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' Over Mounting Costs ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380906 2026-05-07T19:06:35Z 2026-05-07T19:06:35Z A 'closed' sign in front of 'Alligator Alcatraz' | Dave Decker/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Envato

The first-of-its-kind, state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades may soon be closed, a federal official told The New York Times on Thursday. Although the facility has been able to remain operational despite accusations of inhumane conditions, environmental law violations, and breaches of due process, the detention center may not be able to survive without federal funding that has yet to materialize. 

Talks between Florida officials and the Trump administration are in the preliminary stages, but "officials at the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] have concluded that it is too expensive to keep operating…Alligator Alcatraz," which has cost over $1 million a day to run, reports the Times.

Florida built and opened the immigration detention center on a 30-square-mile parcel of land outside of Miami last summer. Originally touted as an "efficient, low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility" by Florida's Attorney General James Uthmeier, the facility was expected to house up to 5,000 detainees and cost $450 million for a single year of operations. 

Florida agreed to front the bill for building the novel hub capable of housing, processing, and deporting detainees directly from the facility's air strip, with the plan to seek reimbursement from the DHS to cover costs. The ambitious project was initially praised by President Donald Trump, who toured the facility on opening day. And former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was amenable to funding the project, saying that Alligator Alcatraz would be funded "in large part" by $625 million set aside by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program. 

But shortly after the detention center's opening, leaked documents showed that the cost to run the facility had ballooned to $608.4 million in less than two weeks of operating. And now, according to the Times, Florida is struggling to front the costs of detaining the nearly 1,400 individuals currently housed there as the state waits for its requested reimbursement. 

As the Times reports, it's still unclear why the DHS reimbursement remains delayed. But it is no mystery why the federal government (and taxpayers) would be disinclined to fund an endless, swampy money pit that has only ever met a fraction of what it promised. 

As I wrote shortly after Alligator Alcatraz's grand opening last summer, Florida officials would have been wise to brush up on the history of the center's namesake. Much like the original Alcatraz, what made the idea of Alligator Alcatraz appealing was, in part, the remote location. By utilizing the intimidating natural security perimeter of places like the Everglades or the San Francisco Bay, the security costs could be kept low. However, the isolated location of the original Alcatraz, although initially perceived as an asset, was ultimately its downfall. The prison was just too expensive to run and maintain because it required all supplies to be shipped in, including food and water. 

Now, it seems, Alligator Alcatraz will meet a similar fate. And while this may be good news for taxpayers, it is unlikely to deter the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign, which border czar Tom Homan promised to re-up earlier this week.

The post DHS Reportedly Weighs Closing Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' Over Mounting Costs appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Reem Ibrahim https://reason.com/people/reem-ibrahim/ <![CDATA[ Pastor Found Guilty of Violating U.K. Speech Laws for Preaching John 3:16 Sermon Near Hospital ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380875 2026-05-07T19:51:10Z 2026-05-07T18:40:25Z A man holding an open bible | Midjourney

The United Kingdom, which has been cracking down on speech for years, dealt free speech another blow on Thursday when a district judge found Clive Johnston, a retired Northern Irish pastor, guilty of preaching John 3:16 in public.

The 78-year-old was convicted of two charges under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zone) Act (Northern Ireland) for holding an open-air service near Causeway Hospital in Coleraine in 2024. This law makes it a crime to do anything that could be seen as "influencing" or "preventing or impeding" people seeking abortion services within 100 meters of a clinic. Eight of these "buffer zones" have been created in Northern Ireland.

However, Johnston did not mention abortion in his sermon. It was also a Sunday, which meant the sexual health clinic was not open for scheduled abortion appointments. Body camera footage shows Johnston speaking about his journey toward faith, playing the ukulele, and preaching John 3:16 ("for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son") before being interrupted by a police officer. The officer tells Johnston that "this is a safe access zone," and he must stop preaching or he "may be removed and liable to prosecution."

Clive Johnston now has a criminal record and has been fined 450 pounds (about $610). The grandfather of seven has never been in trouble with the police before and is expected to appeal the conviction.

After being found guilty, Clive Johnston told the Christian Institute, which is providing him with legal assistance, that it was a "dark day for Christian freedom."

"We held a small, open air Sunday service near a hospital. We made no reference whatsoever to the issue of abortion. And yet the buffer zones law is so broad that holding a Sunday service has been found to be a criminal offense," Johnston said.

"If someone is out there causing trouble, stirring up violence, harassing or verbally attacking people, then, absolutely, go ahead and prosecute them. But I wasn't doing any of those things as the police video shows and as everyone involved in this case accepts," he added.

Johnston is reportedly the first person to be convicted of violating the Safe Access Zones Act without mentioning abortion at all. However, he is not the first person to face prosecution for religious expression near hospitals in Britain. Rose Docherty, a 75-year-old Glaswegian grandmother, was detained, arrested, charged, and released on bail last year for carrying a placard outside a hospital that said: "Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want." Similarly, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was criminally charged in England earlier this year for praying silently near an abortion clinic.

Johnston's conviction sets a precedent for what kind of speech is allowed in buffer zones. It also has wide-ranging implications for free speech more broadly. In Britain, peaceful religious expression can now be criminalized not just for what is actually said, but for views that the listener thinks the speaker might hold.

The post Pastor Found Guilty of Violating U.K. Speech Laws for Preaching John 3:16 Sermon Near Hospital appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Jacob Sullum https://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/ jsullum@reason.com <![CDATA[ DOJ Challenges Denver's 'Assault Weapon' Ban and Colorado's Magazine Limit ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380833 2026-05-07T18:35:58Z 2026-05-07T18:25:38Z Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon | Midjourney

The Department of Justice this week filed two Second Amendment lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, challenging that state's ban on "large capacity" magazines and Denver's ban on "assault weapons." Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department's Civil Rights Division, argues that both laws are unconstitutional for the same reason: They ban arms in common use for lawful purposes, which the Supreme Court has said are covered by the Second Amendment, and there is no "historical tradition" that would justify such a policy, as required by the Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

"The Constitution is not a suggestion and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right," Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Tuesday after the lawsuit against Denver was filed. "Denver's ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles directly violates the right to bear arms. This Department of Justice will vigorously defend the liberties of law-abiding citizens nationwide."

Denver's ordinance was enacted in 1989, the same year that California became the first state to ban so-called assault weapons, a politically defined category that typically hinges on arbitrarily disfavored rifle features such as pistol grips, folding stocks, and flash suppressors. But Denver's ordinance, which prohibits the sale, transfer, or possession of "assault weapons" within city limits, defines the term to include any semi-automatic pistol or center-fire rifle with a fixed or detachable magazine that holds more than 15 rounds. It therefore covers many of the most popular guns sold in the United States when they are equipped with standard-issue magazines, including AR-15-style rifles.

The complaint in United States v. Denver notes that "the term 'assault weapon' is not a technical term used in the firearms industry" but rather "a rhetorically charged political term developed by anti-gun publicists." It adds that the guns banned in Denver "include ordinary semiautomatic rifles possessed by millions of law-abiding Americans." For example, "Americans own literally tens of millions of AR-15 style rifles, the paradigmatic 'assault weapon' covered by the Ordinance." In a case decided last year, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan noted that "the AR–15 is the most popular rifle in the country."

In January, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry's trade association, reported that Americans own more than 32 million "modern sporting rifles," the industry's preferred term for the rifles usually covered by "assault weapon" bans. Survey data suggest that somewhere between 16 million and 25 million Americans have owned AR-15-style rifles. They commonly report using them for lawful purposes such as self-defense, hunting, and target shooting.

Such rifles are rarely used by criminals. In 2019, according to FBI data, "only 364 homicides were known to have been committed with rifles of any type, compared
to 6,368 with handguns, 1,476 with knives or other cutting instruments, 600 with personal weapons (hands, feet, etc.) and 397 with blunt objects," Dhillon notes.

The magazines targeted by Denver's ordinance are also in common use for lawful purposes. "AR-15 platform rifles are usually sold at retail with a detachable box magazine capable of holding up to 30 rounds, and the majority of owners of AR-15 platform rifles use magazines with a capacity of 20 and/or 30 rounds," Dhillon notes. Between 1990 and 2021, according to a 2024 NSSF report, Americans bought more than 400 million rifle magazines with a capacity of 30 or more rounds.

All of this is constitutionally relevant under the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which said the Second Amendment applies to arms "in common use" for "lawful purposes like self-defense." Under Bruen, Denver has the burden of showing that its ordinance nevertheless is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." Denver cannot possibly meet that test, Dhillon argues, because "there is no historical tradition of banning arms in common use."

Since Bruen, Denver City Attorney Miko Brown notes in a May 4 letter to Dhillon, "all six federal appellate courts that have considered assault weapons or large-capacity magazine ('LCM') prohibitions…have upheld them." But there are signs that the Supreme Court may be inclined to reject those applications of Bruen. In addition to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dissented from a 2011 decision upholding the District of Columbia's "assault weapon" ban, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have indicated their receptiveness to Dhillon's argument.

The Justice Department's complaint in United States v. Colorado, which was filed on Wednesday, mirrors the lawsuit against Denver. Since 2013, Colorado has banned the sale, transfer, or possession of magazines that can hold more than 15 rounds. In addition to reiterating the information about rifle magazines, Dhillon notes that "many full-sized 9 mm semi-automatic pistols are sold at retail with magazines with capacities of greater than 15 rounds." Pistols sold with magazines banned in Colorado include the Glock 17, which is "one of the most popular handguns sold in the United States," and the SIG Sauer P365, also a top seller.

"Law-abiding Americans own and use for lawful purposes literally hundreds of millions of magazines [like] those banned by the State," Dhillon says. "The State's magazine ban is a ban on an arm in common use for lawful [purposes] by law-abiding citizens. Therefore, the Magazine Ban violates the Second Amendment." She describes Colorado's law as "political virtue signaling at the expense of Americans' constitutional right to keep and bear arms."

In response to the lawsuit, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser promised to "vigorously defend our state large-capacity magazine limit law from this attack by the Trump Justice Department." Such laws, he said, "are responsible policies that satisfy Second Amendment protections, decrease the deadly impacts of mass shootings, and save lives."

These lawsuits, which seek permanent injunctions barring enforcement of the bans, are part of a litigation campaign launched last year with the establishment of a Second Amendment Section within the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon also has challenged the D.C. "assault weapon" ban.

The legal hook for the lawsuits is 34 USC 12601, which prohibits any law enforcement "pattern or practice of conduct" that "deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States." That statute authorizes the attorney general to address such abuses by filing civil actions seeking "appropriate equitable and declaratory relief."

Weiser questions Dhillon's use of the law. "Using federal civil rights law to put Coloradans at greater risk of gun violence is a dangerous overreach by the Justice Department," he said, "and this lawsuit turns the mission of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division on its head."

Brown has a similar take, saying Dhillon's use of Section 12601 is "neither compelling nor proper." Congress enacted that law "in the wake of the horrific Rodney King beating to provide the federal government with tools to combat excessive force and other kinds of misconduct in state and local police departments," she told Dhillon. "Your effort to use Section 12601 to mount a facial challenge to the City's democratically-enacted Ordinance flies in the face of text, history, and past practice."

Although Dhillon's lawsuits look different from previous uses of Section 12601, that is partly because the Justice Department has not previously taken an interest in litigation aimed at vindicating Second Amendment rights. The statute's broad language, however, encompasses all "rights, privileges, or immunities" guaranteed by the Constitution or by federal statute.

You could argue, as Weiser and Brown presumably will, that Dhillon is improperly challenging legislatively approved policies under the guise of correcting unconstitutional police conduct. But Dhillon argues that enforcement of the Denver and Colorado bans constitutes a "pattern or practice of conduct" within the meaning of Section 12601.

Although the Trump administration has hardly been consistent in defending Second Amendment rights, it deserves credit for challenging at least some of the gun control laws that seem vulnerable under Bruen. Last month, Virginia became the 12th state to enact an "assault weapon" ban, which Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed into law on April 13. Fourteen states and D.C. have imposed limits on magazine capacity, typically 10 rounds.

"I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our new Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding Americans from restrictions such as those we are challenging in these cases," Dhillon said on Tuesday. "Law-abiding Americans, regardless of what city or state they reside in, should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction just for exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms which are owned by tens of millions of their fellow citizens."

The post DOJ Challenges Denver's 'Assault Weapon' Ban and Colorado's Magazine Limit appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Tate Kaufman https://reason.com/people/tate-kaufman/ <![CDATA[ Why Oil-Rich Alberta May Secede From Canada ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380884 2026-05-07T17:55:18Z 2026-05-07T17:55:18Z Canadian flag and Alberta flag | Oasisamuel/Dreamstime

On Monday, a separatist group in the oil-rich Canadian province of Alberta, located just above Montana, submitted over 300,000 signatures in support of a referendum to leave Canada. That's nearly double the amount of signatures required to trigger a vote by law. Recent reporting shows that at least one quarter of the province's population would vote to leave Canada. While the separatists still have substantial gains to make, the popularity of the movement illustrates a growing list of fractures and faults in Canada's constitutional order—particularly cultural differences, economic grievances, and the systemic political underrepresentation of western provinces. 

While Alberta has never formally begun the long road to secession until now, the Francophone province of Quebec has twice held referendums on whether to leave Canada. The second, in 1995, saw "remain" narrowly win with 50.58 percent of the vote, triggering the Supreme Court of Canada to issue an advisory opinion dictating the terms under which Quebec could elect to secede from Canada. There, the court said: "The other provinces and the federal government would have no basis to deny the right of the government of Quebec to pursue secession should a clear majority of the people of Quebec choose that goal, so long as in doing so, Quebec respects the rights of others." 

The Quebec opinion provides the legal basis on which Alberta could also separate. However, the language requiring a seceding province to "respect the rights of others" is now being leveraged to contest Alberta's ability to separate. Separation, some indigenous groups have argued in court, would infringe on collective indigenous rights granted through treaties and enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the country's bill of rights). 

But an adverse ruling is likely to only fuel the feelings of lopsided treatment undergirding separatist sentiment. Fundamentally, the Alberta Sovereignty movement is born from a perceived disconnect in values and vision between the country's more conservative, economically productive prairie provinces, like Alberta, and the less economically successful, but politically dominant eastern provinces, particularly Quebec.

The origins of the province's first settlers are telling. Albertans have always had a different culture and different ideals from the francophones and monarchists in the east. Early migrants to Alberta included Mormons, Germans, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans, most of whom immigrated north from the United States, rather than from better-settled parts of Canada. They were aspiring Americans who, after riding the long trails from Ellis Island to the Rocky Mountains, chased opportunity north, where land was cheaper and easier to acquire.

And these cultural differences remain, especially in the province's conservative political tendencies. For example, in 2024, Tucker Carlson went on a sold-out tour of the province, charging 200 CAD ($147) a seat for speaking events with the province's premier (the equivalent of the governor). Alberta is also rich with the culture of the Wild West; it is home to the Calgary Stampede, the world's largest outdoor rodeo. 

Compounding these cultural differences is Alberta's unique economic position within Canada. Beneath Alberta's surface lies approximately 167 billion barrels of oil reserves, nearly four times the volume in the United States. But Alberta is one of only two landlocked provinces in Canada, meaning it cannot get this oil to the international market absent the cooperation of other provinces.

Complicating this are the extensive interprovincial trade barriers erected by Canadian provinces against each other. Unlike the United States, Canada does not prohibit discrimination against out-of-state commerce. The problem is so severe that a 2019 report from the International Monetary Fund observed that "international free trade agreements [allow] foreign companies better access to Canada than Canadian companies [have]." This internal absence of free trade creates bad incentives: Provinces that rely on cheap oil to keep their manufacturing sectors competitive are incentivized to block that oil from reaching international markets, even if it lowers national productivity overall. 

Further aggravating matters is a constitutional redistribution scheme known as "equalization payments." Equalization, designed to redistribute revenues from "have" provinces to "have not" provinces, is calculated according to each province's tax base. Since the program began in 1957, Alberta has not received a single penny in equalization payments. Comparatively, between 2015 and 2025 alone, the province of Quebec received $129 billion, for which Alberta footed most of the bill. This disparity is greatened by an exemption on hydropower, one of Quebec's largest sources of revenue, and self-imposed restrictions on economic productivity, such as Quebec's longstanding province-wide ban on retail stores being open past 5 p.m. on weekends. 

These economic issues have contributed to Canada's steady economic decline over the past 10 years of liberal party rule. The nation now has a lower gross domestic product per capita than Alabama, one of the least productive U.S. states. 

Finally, separatists have capitalized on feelings of political disenfranchisement after a decade of liberal rule, leveraging Albertans' sense of powerlessness in trying to fix the aforementioned issues. Canada is a parliamentary system, meaning that Canadians elect a single representative for their electoral district, known as a riding, and the party with the most representatives forms government, with the head of that party becoming prime minister. Because of Alberta's significant concentration of conservative voters, ridings are often won by margins well over 70 percent, even in a multiparty system. Eastern provinces, on the other hand, are often won nearer to the 50 percent mark, and frequently below that line in ridings where at least three parties are competitive. From a popular vote perspective, this means that Albertans have significantly less sway in determining the ruling party, and thus the prime minister, than voters living in Eastern Canada. 

This political reality is compounded by a series of districting rules that prevent provinces with relatively waning populations from losing seats and that add seats based on senate representation. Unlike the American Senate, section 22 of the Canadian Constitution does not provide equal Senate seats for each province, but rather between Quebec, Ontario, the Western provinces (including Alberta) as a bloc, and the Atlantic provinces as a bloc. This would be like if California, New York, and Texas got two senators each, but the entire Midwest had to share 6 senators. As a result of these practices, not only are Albertans underrepresented when compared with the popular vote, but each riding in Alberta has more people in it, making every vote literally worth less. 

It's uncertain how and when the separation referendum will unfold. But Alberta's grievances illustrate legitimate flaws in Canada's system of federalism. A failure to address them would likely cause further rifts between Canada's eastern and western provinces. 

The post Why Oil-Rich Alberta May Secede From Canada appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Michael Auslin https://reason.com/people/michael-auslin/ auslin@stanford.edu <![CDATA[ How the Declaration of Independence Captured American Hearts and Minds ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8377643 2026-05-01T16:00:26Z 2026-05-07T17:34:42Z

[This post is excerpted from the new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).]

That Abraham Lincoln, our most American of presidents, "never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence," our most American of documents, seems only appropriate. That Lincoln was both a political philosopher and political genius may be enough to explain why the lanky rail-splitter from Illinois repeatedly invoked the Declaration, even before entering the political arena and when he had no expectations of returning to political office. Like his contemporaries, however, Lincoln grew up surrounded by images of the Declaration, keeping it a living document in the minds of Americans. In this 250th year of Independence, understanding the Declaration's prevalence as a cultural and material object in the first half of the 19th century may help explain how, after decades of relative obscurity, it became the undisputed expression of the American creed that we celebrate today.

The quote that opened this post is from Lincoln's speech at Independence Hall, on February 22, 1861. Traveling by train from his home in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln stopped in Philadelphia to address a crowd at the spot where the Declaration was signed. By now, with the Confederate States of America established, with their capital in Montgomery, Alabama, the Declaration was at the center of the great crisis that had been brewing at least since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and more accurately, since July 4, 1776. By 1861, references and appeals to the Declarations principles came not just from the Republican president-elect, but from Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his Vice-President Alexander Stephens, in newspapers and polemicists in North and South. Though secession was a constitutional crisis, arguments both pro and con were infused with the spirit of the Declaration.

Such prominence for the Declaration would have surprised second-generation Americans. To them, the Declaration was a relic of the Revolution, an honored but largely ignored document. It had done its job announcing the Colonies' separation from Great Britain; after that, the job of governing was the preserve first of the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution. In the first decade of the 19th century, John Adams' Federalists forbore from honoring the Declaration on July 4, while Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans celebrated both the document and its drafter. Few on either side, however, saw it as having much of a role to play in an America a full generation away from Independence.

A closer sense of connection to the Declaration began after the War of 1812 and the near-miraculous rescue of the Declaration from the British during the invasion of Washington in August 1814. Saved from the flames that gutted the White House and incinerated the State Department building next door, the Declaration from the mid-1810s was covered in an aura of reverence, both for its survival and as the symbol of a young nation that had now twice defeated the greatest empire on earth. Yet few Americans had ever seen the Declaration beyond occasional reprints of its text in newspapers or collections of documents. The lucky ones who had actually seen the engrossed parchment signed by the Founding Fathers starting in August 1776 were but a handful of the population.

All that began to change in 1818. That year, when Abraham Lincoln was but nine years old, the first artistic reproduction of the Declaration went on sale. Created by Washington calligrapher Benjamin Owen Tyler, the facsimile so expertly reproduced the signatures of the members of the Continental Congress that the Secretary of State attested to their perfection. The next year an even more elaborate version was offered by John Binns, who had first proposed a facsimile, but took so long to bring his to market that he was beaten to the punch by Owen. The full-size prints brought to Americans for the first time an artistic interpretation of the document that remained hidden in the State Department library.

The same year that Tyler's reproduction went on sale, John Trumbull's masterpiece, The Declaration of Independence was first shown to the public. The massive painting, 18 by 30 feet, fancifully depicted the moment that Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five presented their draft of the Declaration to John Hancock and the Continental Congress. The original was hung in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in 1826, where it has remained since. Soon available in both quality and inexpensive versions, Trumbull's heroic vision of the birth of the United States became perhaps the most famous American painting of the 19th century, sold widely throughout the country.

As fascination with the Declaration grew, the parchment itself was beginning to deteriorate from mishandling. In 1820, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned engraver William J. Stone to create an exact facsimile, something neither Binns nor Tyler had attempted. Stone labored for three years, and in 1823 his copperplate engraving was completed. Several hundred parchment copies, followed by more paper copies, were run off and given to national and State officials and other prominent individuals. Though not yet widely available, the Stone Engraving nonetheless became the iconic image of the Declaration, the one from which all future copies would be made.

To the Stone and the various reproductions were now added popular biographies of the Signers of the Declaration, published first by John Sanderson in 1829, but followed by dozens more in succeeding decades. So ubiquitous was the Declaration in American life that a Hungarian visitor to the United States in the early-1830s saw it hung in houses and inns throughout his travels. It was, he noted, "the indispensable furnishing and handbook in the home of every citizen."

This, then, was the milieu in which Abraham Lincoln grew up. The Declaration was reprinted in school primers and American history books, and biographies of the Signers crowded the shelves, while walls were adorned with replicas of the text and signatures or reprints of John Trumbull's painting. By the time the actual parchment of the Declaration was put on display in the Patent Office in Washington in 1841, Americans of all classes and regions had brought the document into their homes, schools, and churches.

For many Americans, undoubtedly, facsimiles of the Declaration spurred no more than patriotic pride or interest in an era now all but faded from living memory. But for some, perhaps like Abraham Lincoln, the constant exposure to the Declaration invited a deeper reflection on its imperishable passages and philosophy. Indeed, John Binns himself had written that his "embellished edition…will have a tendency to spread the knowledge of its contents…and familiarize those principles which form, the very bond and cement of political society."

Thus, it was that a twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln could invoke the Declaration to his listeners at the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield in January 1838 in urging them to continue to "uphold the proud fabric of freedom." And later, when confronted with the moral and legal abominations that were the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, Lincoln began refashioning the Declaration into a universal and eternal symbol of equality and freedom. With his entire political philosophy derived from the Declaration, Lincoln found the moral courage to link America's destiny to the end of slavery, though his political pragmatism also recognized, at least until 1861 (and probably later) the limits on such a radical program.

There is, of course, no sure way to know how much of the inspiration for Lincoln's intellectual engagement came from a material encounter with Declaration reprints, images, and the like. And yet, without the founding charter becoming such a fixture in the American imagination, it is certainly believable that Jefferson's sonorous phrases may not have penetrated as deeply into the national consciousness, not least into the minds of men like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln. Nor might it have inspired others, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to write their own declarations calling for greater equality and liberty.

It would have been easy to refer to the legal framework of the Constitution, at least in some cases, but the moral argument, the passionate demand for justice, could only be provided by the Declaration. Gazing upon John Trumbull's heroic scene inside Independence Hall, reading Jefferson's words on copies hung on walls, reliving the experiences of the Signers, all prepared the American mind for the great struggles to create a more perfect Union. The Declaration is not just its timeless principles, but also its unique material history in American culture. Which, perhaps, is why parents still buy antiqued copies of the Declaration for their children and why we still frame Trumbull's portrait on our walls. Like Lincoln and his contemporaries, the Declaration remains a living document, calling forth the better angels of our nature. May it continue to do so for another quarter-millennium.

The post How the Declaration of Independence Captured American Hearts and Minds appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Veronique de Rugy https://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/ <![CDATA[ Trump's Government-Funded Retirement Plan Misses the Point ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380844 2026-05-07T15:50:28Z 2026-05-07T15:55:02Z A man holds cash next to "TrumpIRA.gov" | Envato/The White House

President Donald Trump and Congress want to help you increase your savings. And you should. At the household level, saving is the foundation of financial security and the seed capital for a better retirement. At the economy-wide level, savings fund investment that expands the capital stock, raises wages, and grows the economy. A society that does not save is a society slowly consuming its future.

So, any politician who wants to help Americans save more deserves at least a hearing. What should such a politician propose?

The first thing to do is remove all government-made barriers to savings. This includes a Social Security design that disincentivizes saving, and a tax code that hits much of our savings twice, as both income and investment returns. Addressing our massive debt—which threatens to bring inflation back and literally destroy the value of the savings we already have—would help too.

Alas, this isn't what Trump has in mind with his new executive order directing the Treasury to launch "TrumpIRA.gov," a portal where workers without employer-sponsored retirement plans can shop for private accounts. And some of them will be able to claim a federal Saver's Match of up to $1,000 a year.

The plans are vague, but we can get an idea from a bipartisan bill currently before Congress. The Retirement Savings for Americans Act would automatically enroll workers earning below the national median income in new retirement accounts and provide government matching contributions. According to RAND Corporation research, roughly 63 million workers would be eligible for these accounts, and 42 million would qualify for the match.

Bipartisan support for the idea is growing. Wall Street firms see new customers. Progressives see expanded government involvement in retirement. Some conservatives see a backdoor route to Social Security privatization. I urge skepticism.

Start with the core of the proposal. The Saver's Match is not a Trump innovation. It was created by the 2022 SECURE 2.0 Act under former President Joe Biden. Trump's executive order merely accelerates its rollout and expands its visibility. It will be very expensive.

Romina Bocca at the Cato Institute writes in The Washington Post that if modeled after the bill mentioned above, then "starting in 2027, low-income workers with existing retirement accounts are set to receive up to $1,000 in matching funds, at a cost to federal taxpayers of $9.3 billion through 2032. Expanding eligibility and automatically enrolling workers without existing accounts, as proposed by the bipartisan Retirement Savings for Americans Act, would be far more costly. Some projections put the price tag at $285 billion over the first decade alone."

That's real money being added to a federal balance sheet already groaning under the weight of a Social Security system facing roughly $28 trillion in long-term shortfalls.

But the fiscal objection, while serious, is not the deepest one. The deeper problem is that the proposal's backers misread the savings behavior of the households they claim to help.

Decades of economic research tell a consistent story: Low-income households are not failing to save because they lack tax-advantaged ways to do it. They fail to save because when you live paycheck to paycheck, locking money in an account you cannot access without incurring penalties, such as IRAs, 401(k)s and 529s, is risky.

Vanguard data show that households at the lowest income levels have the highest early withdrawal rates from existing retirement accounts, with penalties accounting for a disproportionate share of their tax burden. According to Boccia, penalties account for 43 percent of all taxes paid by individuals with adjusted gross incomes below $5,000.

Automatic enrollment, which animates much of the enthusiasm for expanded accounts, does not change this calculus for everyone. Research using Danish pension data found that some workers simply offset mandatory contributions by reducing voluntary saving. A large-scale United Kingdom study found that 18-21 cents of every dollar saved through auto-enrollment is offset by taking on debt. A recent study shows that the benefits of auto-enrollment are much smaller than original estimates assumed.

The better path is genuine simplification: a universal savings account that shields its owner from the tax bias against saving, allows contributions from any after-tax income, imposes no restrictions on withdrawals, and requires no government match and no new federal spending. Canada and the United Kingdom have run this experiment. Accounts were used enthusiastically across all income levels, including by moderate- and lower-income households who value flexibility above all else.

Finally, if politicians truly care about securing Americans' retirement income, they should have the courage both to reform Social Security (to stop lower-income seniors from being hit with an automatic 23 percent benefit cut while preventing massive increase of the debt) and to reform a tax code that creates silly disincentives to save.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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]]> Ronald Bailey https://reason.com/people/ronald-bailey/ rbailey@reason.com <![CDATA[ Trump's Health Bureaucrats Are Undermining Confidence in Vaccines ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380716 2026-05-07T14:53:15Z 2026-05-07T14:30:16Z File on vaccines in a folder that says 'Blocked' | Illustration: Adani Samat

Back in November, Vinay Prasad, then-director of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, asserted in an internal email that "at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination." He provided no evidence to back up his claim then, and none has since been forthcoming. Prasad left the agency at the end of April. Good riddance.

In the meantime, other Trump administration officials have continued their efforts to undermine the American public's confidence in the safety of previously vetted and approved vaccines. Jay Bhattacharya, who is simultaneously head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has been notably active in that endeavor.

In April, Bhattacharya delayed and eventually spiked publication of a study in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) on the effectiveness of 2025–2026 COVID-19 vaccination against emergency care and hospitalization. The researchers found that real-world vaccination effectiveness among adults over age 18 was "50% against COVID-19–associated emergency department and urgent care encounters and 55% against COVID-19–associated hospitalization, compared with not receiving a 2025–2026 vaccine dose."

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Bhattacharya characterized his suppression of the report as being due to a "scientific disagreement" over the methodology used by researchers. In particular, Bhattacharya objected to the "test negative design" used by researchers to probe the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines updated for 2025–2026.

Test negative studies are widely used by researchers around the world (including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and across Europe) for studying respiratory virus vaccine effectiveness. A test-negative study checks how well a vaccine works by comparing sick people who show up at medical facilities who test positive for a disease (COVID-19) with sick people (other respiratory illnesses) who test negative. Researchers see who was vaccinated in each group. If fewer vaccinated people test positive for COVID-19, the vaccine is helping protect against the disease.

The suppressed study found the vaccines were around 50 percent effective in protecting against emergency room encounters and hospitalization. Because so many Americans have already been vaccinated or have had COVID-19 infections, the researchers also observed that vaccine effectiveness should "be interpreted as the added benefit of 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccination in a population with high levels of infection-induced immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, or both." In addition, the suppressed study forthrightly acknowledged some of the limitations noted by Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya implies that the articles in the CDC's MMWR are somehow faulty because they are not "peer reviewed" by outsiders. It is, however, worth noting that peer-reviewed articles on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness have, in the past, generally come to the same basic estimates as those published in the CDC's MMWR.

Trump administration health officials are evidently not just satisfied to suppress information on the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that the FDA has now blocked the publication in peer-reviewed journals of several new agency-supported studies vetting the safety of COVID-19 and shingles vaccines. A preprint of one of the suppressed COVID-19 studies looked at 14 different possible deleterious side effects among 7.5 million Medicare beneficiaries. The study found that "there were no new safety signals identified following 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccinations among U.S. Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years and older."

Another now-canceled FDA study examining the incidence of 17 possible health outcomes among 4.2 million people vaccinated against COVID-19 reported, "No new safety concerns were found following 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccination among U.S. health plan enrollees aged 6 months–64 years."

The Times further reports that in February, the FDA refused to allow agency staff to submit short reports on the Shingrix vaccine to a drug safety conference. Numerous previous studies have found that Shingrix is basically safe, although there is a slightly increased post-vaccination risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Vaccination not only protects against shingles, but studies also find that it is also associated with a lower risk of heart disease, dementia, and death in people aged 50 and older.

Although the authors of the suppressed COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness study demurely omitted it, prior MMWR reports on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness generally concluded their findings "support CDC and ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] recommendations that all persons aged ≥6 months receive 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccination."

Consequently, it seems likely that the speculation by the person who leaked the suppressed COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness report to Inside Medicine is correct:

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his underlings like Bhattacharya—might be hoping to further weaken CDC recommendations for seasonal Covid-19 vaccines this year. It's possible that the CDC may even weaken its recommendations for high-risk patients above age 65.

In his disingenuous op-ed in The Washington Post, Bhattacharya declared, "Scientific integrity demands rigor, openness to challenge and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, especially when it is inconvenient." Yet, he and other Trump administration health bureaucrats clearly see fit to suppress evidence they find inconvenient. So much for "scientific integrity."

The post Trump's Health Bureaucrats Are Undermining Confidence in Vaccines appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Liz Wolfe https://reason.com/people/liz-wolfe/ liz.wolfe@reason.com <![CDATA[ Florida Wins the Curriculum Wars ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380767 2026-05-07T13:26:03Z 2026-05-07T13:30:43Z An Invitation to the Great American Story by Wilfred M. McClay | Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story/Wilfred M. McClay/Ancientaftertone/Dreamstime

Florida just created its own alternative to A.P. United States History, and it seems pretty good.

Headlines describe it as "anti-woke" and "more conservative," but this framing is a little tired and unsophisticated. Instead, I'd offer that it seems a lot more balanced and positive on Western/Enlightenment ideals than the curriculum it is replacing. It seems rather similar to what most of us were taught in school, provided we attended school prior to the late 2010s.

The recommended textbook for the course is Hillsdale professor Wilfred M. McClay's Land of Hope: An Invitation to the American Story, which—though I have not personally read it—seems like a useful corrective and better alternative to, say, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (which is frequently used in A.P. U.S. History classes).

"One of the worst sins of the present—not just ours but any present—is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn't trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time," writes McClay. I fully agree, and this seems like an appropriate lens through which one should view teaching of the past. But McClay is also rather sensible when it comes to the specifics.

"Generally, traditional texts address industrialization after the Civil War with trepidation. A few words are offered in support of free enterprise and the amazing economic accomplishments of the period, but the story is overshadowed by coverage of 'robber barons,' the growth of labor unions, strikes, income inequality, and urbanization," writes Mark C. Schug in a review of the book for EconLib. "This is all prologue for the arrival of the Progressive Movement—the good guys—who come to rescue us from the evils of unfettered capitalism. Traditional texts cheer the passage of legislation to establish government oversight over vast swaths of the economy, including the passage of antitrust laws, the Federal Reserve Act, the regulation of railroads, the passage of the 16th amendment (the income tax), and so forth.…[But] McClay is not so ardent a cheerleader for elite experts managing our lives that he glosses over other aspects of Progressive behavior."

"Too many of today's textbooks are overburdened with detail and disfigured by partisan animus, and leave students of the American past confused, ill-informed, and unprepared for the task of citizenship in a free society," McClay told interviewers with Encounter Books. "We have had, and continue to have, serious national problems, such as our problems of racial inequality, missteps in our relations with other nations, and other problems that show us to be in conflict with our national creed and our deepest values. We are very far from being perfect, and it has been important for Americans to face up to these problems, rather than pretend that they do not exist." But "the trouble comes when the self-criticism loses all sense of perspective, and becomes relentless and corrosive, taking the nation's flaws as the totality of its being." This strikes me as totally fair, and indeed a good way of looking at it.

I still have a few questions: Will students be able to get college credit for taking this course, even when applying to schools outside of Florida? (If not, it won't serve as a real substitute for the A.P. U.S. History class; getting college credit while still in high school is a major unlock for those who don't want to blow all their money on college. As it stands right now, it seems like they could become eligible for college credit within Florida but not outside of it.) What will students think of the course? And, if successful, will other states follow suit, using Florida as a positive example of how to overhaul curricula?

Waiting on Tehran: "The US is waiting on Iran to respond to its proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end a war that's killed thousands of people, with tensions still high and Israel striking Lebanon's capital on Wednesday," reports Bloomberg. The Trump administration seems to hope Iran will capitulate, ending its nuclear program as well as its enrichment of uranium, and possibly even handing over the already-enriched uranium to the United States. (This seems…hard to pull off.)

Scenes from New York: I'm fascinated by the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdami's belief that vast swaths of Manhattan are food deserts—something that's provably false.

QUICK HITS

  • "Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery," reports the Post. "The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported."
  • I'm not sure I agree with the claim that this war hasn't been that bad for the U.S. economically—people are absolutely feeling high gas prices—but this point about the Jones Act is rather interesting:

  • A French cargo ship was attacked on Tuesday in the Strait of Hormuz, presumably by Iran or its proxies. American authorities claim the ship had not coordinated with the U.S. military, so the ship's safe passage could not be ensured. Eight crew members are injured.
  • "Eli Lilly & Co.'s blockbuster diabetes drug Mounjaro has surpassed Merck & Co.'s cancer therapy Keytruda as the world's best-selling medication," reports Bloomberg. "Mounjaro generated $8.7 billion for Lilly in the first quarter of 2026, outperforming Merck's Keytruda, which posted sales of $7.9 billion. Keytruda has been the world's top-selling drug since the first quarter of 2023, when it displaced AbbVie Inc.'s autoimmune disorder drug Humira."
  • Watching this trend:

  • More on how artificial intelligence is changing the legal profession from Odd Lots.
  • Anthropic makes a deal with SpaceX.
  • "Margaret, my wife's grandmother, was still in her home two days after her death when Maria and I arrived in the village of Cruglic, Moldova," writes Jesse Blackwood for Plough. "The house was always open and visitors would arrive at any time. Each of these visits followed the same pattern. They were always offered a glass of wine and a few candies and cookies on behalf of Margaret, which when accepted, the response was always, 'May God forgive her.' Then, after kissing the icon and cross and spending some time sitting with Margaret they would usually come to the kitchen for a full meal. This pattern was not altogether different than it had been in Margaret's life."
  • I love to run but am horrified by the social changes I'm seeing especially from upper-middle-class young people with extra time on their hands. Everyone needs to LOOSEN UP!

The post Florida Wins the Curriculum Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ Today in Supreme Court History: May 7, 1873 ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8340494 2025-07-11T16:29:34Z 2026-05-07T11:00:52Z 5/7/1873: Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died. One month earlier, he dissented in the Slaughter-House Cases, and was the lone dissenter in Bradwell v. Illinois.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: May 7, 1873 appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Damon Root https://reason.com/people/damon-w-root/ damon.root@reason.com <![CDATA[ 11 Big SCOTUS Cases That Will Be Decided Soon ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380752 2026-05-06T19:55:20Z 2026-05-07T11:00:12Z 05.06.26-v1 | Illustration: Midjourney

The U.S. Supreme Court has now entered the final stretch of its 2025–2026 term. The oral arguments have all been heard, and the merits cases have all been submitted. What's left now is the writing and announcing of all of the remaining opinions. We'll get those opinions sometime later this month or next, as the Court typically wraps everything up by the end of June, just in time for a nice summer holiday.

So what's left? Here are 11 big cases that I'll be watching out for in the weeks ahead.

Immigration: There are two notable immigration cases still to be decided. First, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court is weighing whether asylum seekers who present themselves at the U.S. border may be lawfully turned away or whether they must instead be inspected by immigration officials and entered into the asylum system for further processing. Second, in Mullin v. Doe, the Court will determine whether the Trump administration improperly removed the temporary protected status (TPS) of Syrian and Haitian nationals. The TPS program permits qualifying foreigners to remain in the U.S. because it would be too risky for them to return to their home countries.

Guns: There are also two major gun cases still to be decided. First, Wolford v. Lopez asks whether Hawaii violated the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms when it told licensed concealed carry permit holders that they must obtain the express permission of the property owner before they may carry a handgun on private property that is open to the public. Second, in United States v. Hemani, the justices are considering whether a federal law that prohibits illegal drug users from having guns violates the Second Amendment.

Transgender athletes: The Supreme Court heard back-to-back oral arguments in January in a pair of cases that each involve a government ban on transgender women and girls competing in women's and girls' sports. The question presented to the Court in the first one, Little v. Hecox, is "whether laws that seek to protect women's and girls' sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." The question presented to the Court in the second one, West Virginia v. B.J.P., is "whether Title IX prevents a state from consistently designating girls' and boys' sports teams based on biological sex determined at birth."

Presidential control over federal agencies: There are also two huge cases that fall within this broad category, but they pose quite different questions. First, in Trump v. Slaughter, the question is whether President Donald Trump may fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for purely political reasons, rather than "for cause." There happens to be a 1935 SCOTUS precedent that says the president may not fire an FTC commissioner for purely political reasons, so what this case is effectively about is whether that precedent should be overruled, limited, or left standing (and thus enforced against Trump). The case of Trump v. Cook, on the other hand, asks whether Trump's ostensible "for cause" firing of Lisa Cook from her position as a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors actually satisfied the terms of the "for cause" requirement in federal law, or whether it was really just a pretext designed to cover up Trump's illegal political rationale for firing her.

Birthright citizenship: Acting via executive order, the president has purported to deny the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship to children whose parents are illegal immigrants or lawfully present temporary visitors. Trump v. Barbara asks whether that executive order is unconstitutional.

Mail-in ballots: The Constitution says that "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." The case of Watson v. Republican National Committee asks whether a Mississippi law that allows the counting of mail-in ballots that were sent by election day but were not received until after election day runs afoul of the federal law that established a uniform national date for federal elections.

Fourth Amendment searches and "geofence warrants": The case of Chatrie v. United States originated when law enforcement officials told Google to search the location histories of all of its users in order to determine which users were present in the vicinity of a bank robbery. The Supreme Court is tasked with determining what the Fourth Amendment actually permits in such cases.

In sum, we'll soon get a heap of Supreme Court decisions on a range of contentious issues. Stay tuned.

The post 11 Big SCOTUS Cases That Will Be Decided Soon appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Fiona Harrigan https://reason.com/people/fiona-harrigan/ fiona.harrigan@reason.com <![CDATA[ Photo: Technology Is Bringing Lost Paintings Into the Public Eye ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8378364 2026-04-24T16:57:45Z 2026-05-07T10:00:14Z A Rembrandt painting | Photo: Wikimedia

Researchers at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum announced the discovery of a new painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt in March. A two-year study of the work—involving materials analysis, macro X-ray fluorescence scans, and dendrochronological dating of the wooden painting surface—revealed that Vision of Zacharias in the Temple, which had been in a private individual's possession since 1961, was painted by the Dutch master in 1633.

Researchers have used scientific methods to authenticate and uncover new information about several other works of art in recent years. In 2018, infrared imaging technology revealed a 1902 newspaper page and another composition below the surface of Pablo Picasso's Mother and Child by the Sea.

The post Photo: Technology Is Bringing Lost Paintings Into the Public Eye appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Charles Oliver https://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/ <![CDATA[ Brickbat: Tell Us Your Name ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380621 2026-05-06T05:35:30Z 2026-05-07T08:00:39Z Silhouettes in profile against the background of the word "CENSORED." | Illustration: Leo Lintang/Dreamstime

Greece plans to ban anonymity on social media, claiming it will reduce online toxicity, harassment, fake news, and hate speech. Digital Governance Minister Dimitris Papastergiou says people should express opinions but only with their real identities, so they can be held responsible for what they post. The plan, which is being developed under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, would require social media platforms to verify users' real identities. Officials say they are not banning all pseudonyms but want every account linked to a real person. Critics say the move will chill free speech issues and be difficult to enforce, but government officials say they want to create a healthier online environment ahead of the 2027 elections.

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]]> Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/people/eugene-volokh/ <![CDATA[ Open Thread ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380655 2026-05-07T07:00:00Z 2026-05-07T07:00:00Z The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Stephen Halbrook https://reason.com/people/stephen-halbrook3/ <![CDATA[ Second Amendment Roundup: A Tale of Two Waiting Periods ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380809 2026-05-07T01:42:09Z 2026-05-07T01:42:07Z On October 25, 2023, 18 people were killed in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine.  The killer's declining mental health was known to law enforcement since that May.  On July 6, although he owned other firearms, he legally purchased the firearm that he would use in the attack.  By August, he repeatedly threatened members of his Army Reserve unit that he would "shoot up" the base.  He was hospitalized for psychological evaluation but released.  Two months later, he carried out his nefarious threats at a bowling alley and a cafe.

In 2024, the Final Report of the Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston was released, faulting both the military and law enforcement for taking no action to disarm and hospitalize the killer.

Before the Commission report was even released, the Maine legislature enacted a statute targeting any person who would buy a firearm: "Waiting Period. A seller may not knowingly deliver a firearm to a buyer pursuant to an agreement sooner than 72 hours after the agreement."  As the timeline of events indicated, no relation existed between the perpetrator's vile acts taking place six months earlier and the 72-hour firearm transfer waiting period.

In Beckwith v. Frey, decided on April 3, the First Circuit reversed the district court's issuance of a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the new law.  For those needing a firearm for protection against an immediate threat, not to worry.  The court found it relevant that the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence submitted a statement warning that potential victims not obtain firearms for protection as the firearms were more likely to be used against them, and anyway the Coalition offered "services" to keep victims safe during the seventy-two-hour waiting period.  That must have been reassuring to battered spouses facing death threats.

In the opinion for the court, Judge Seth Aframe held that "laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment's 'plain text,'" which only "means to have and carry guns."  Since the law regulates activity that takes place before that, it is "outside the Second Amendment's plain text."  Under that logic, nothing in the text of the Amendment would preclude a law that simply banned absolutely the delivery or transfer of a firearm from one person to another.  One's right to keep and bear arms does not imply a right to obtain them.

Plaintiffs, the court continued, thus had the burden to show that the law was "abusive" in line with Bruen's footnote nine.  The court read footnote nine to mean that "the full two-step analysis did not apply to 'shall-issue' laws because these laws delay, but do not deny, licenses while states ensure that guns are being carried by law-abiding and responsible citizens."  However, the Supreme Court only stated in footnote nine that "shall-issue regimes, which often require applicants to undergo a background check or pass a firearms safety course, are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, 'law-abiding, responsible citizens.'" It added that, "because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry."  Wait times must thus be keyed to requirements like a background check, not just waiting for its own sake.

The Beckwith court next turned to Heller's statement that nothing in the opinion "should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."  The court read "longstanding" to modify only "prohibitions," not "laws imposing conditions," and so the waiting period need not be longstanding.  (That issue may be moot, as Bruen requires Founding-era analogues.)  And it said that a "condition" need not be a particularized criterion that an individual must meet – the waiting period is itself a condition.

Finally, Beckwith stated that in other contexts, the Supreme Court "strictly scrutinizes laws that directly restrict the exercise of fundamental rights but often reviews more deferentially laws that only impose incidental burdens on the exercise of those rights."  It mentioned the First Amendment, but did not venture to suggest that the Supreme Court would approve a waiting period per se for exercise of any right protected by the First Amendment.

Ortega v. Grisham (10th Cir. 2025), an opinion by Judge Timothy Tymkovich, is in stark contrast with Beckwith.  Ortega invalidated a New Mexico statute providing that "[a] waiting period of seven calendar days shall be required for the sale of a firearm and the transfer of the firearm to the buyer." The court held that "the right to bear arms requires a right to acquire arms, just as the right to free press necessarily includes the right to acquire a printing press, or the right to freely practice religion necessarily rests on a right to acquire a sacred text."  When the text authorizes an act, it implicitly authorizes any necessary predicate of the act.

Moreover, Ortega continued, Heller's reference to "longstanding prohibitions" modified "laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms." The waiting period is not a longstanding prohibition and it is not limited to commercial sales.  Furthermore, "It is not a condition because it cannot be met by any action, and it is not a qualification because it is universally applicable…. The sale happens regardless, and the waiting period is just an artificial delay on possession."

Nor could the state meet its burden to show that the law had appropriate historical analogues, including intoxication laws, license and permitting regimes, and targeted group bans on firearm carry or possession.  The law assumes that "anyone seeking to purchase a firearm can be presumed irresponsible or non-law-abiding, purely by dint of their intention to purchase a firearm."  That contrasts with the purpose of shall-issue licensing regimes and background checks which have the purpose of assuring that firearm purchasers are responsible, law-abiding citizens.

So we can add waiting periods to the growing list of Second Amendment restrictions that the Supreme Court should resolve, either by a case on point or a principle of general applicability.

It's worth recalling how "cooling off" periods came to national attention as a panacea for violence committed by the mentally deranged.  John Hinckley, Jr., purchased a revolver and shot President Ronald Reagan five months later.  (Ironically, the attempted assassination took place at the same Washington Hilton Hotel where an assailant sought to shoot President Donald Trump and cabinet members on April 25.) To solve that problem, Handgun Control Inc., later renamed the Brady Center, championed a seven-day waiting period on handgun purchases, albeit without a background check.  The NRA supported an instant background check on all firearm purchases from FFLs instead.

The result was the misnamed Brady Handgun Prevention Act of 1993.  Its interim provision, 18 U.S.C. § 922(s), purported to conscript state law enforcement officers to conduct background checks on handgun buyers, who could be cleared right away or within no more than within five days.  I was honored to argue Sheriff Jay Printz v. U.S. (1997), in which the Supreme Court held that Congress may not command the states to administer this (or any other) federal regulatory program.

The permanent provision of the Brady Act, § 922(t), established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).  NICS provides for immediate transfer of a firearm, but may delay approval of the transfer for not more than three days, if NICS does not find that the transfer would violate federal or state law.  Because it created an instant check and no waiting period, the "Brady" Act may as well have been named the "NRA" Act.  But that's all water over the dam now.

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]]> Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/people/eugene-volokh/ <![CDATA[ Court Dismisses Matt Taibbi's Defamation Lawsuit Over "Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left" ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380789 2026-05-06T20:32:04Z 2026-05-06T20:32:04Z From Taibbi v. Higgins, decided yesterday by Judge George Daniels (S.D.N.Y.):

This action centers around Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left ("Owned" or the "Book"), a book authored by Higgins and published by Bold Type Books. Owned purports to explore "how tech elites and formerly left-wing journalists forged an alliance" to create a "new right-wing media ecosystem."

As relevant here, the Book depicts Plaintiff as one of several independent journalists whose politics shifted in recent years to attract a more conservative audience. Plaintiff began his writing career in post-Soviet Russia. In 2004, Plaintiff joined Rolling Stone, where he gained acclaim reporting on "the big banks and the excesses of Wall Street" during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. According to the Book, Plaintiff's image among liberal pundits declined after Plaintiff pushed back on allegations of Russian electoral interference in the 2016 presidential election and "old misogynistic writings resurfaced," The Book claims that "[a]fter his rejection by the left, [Plaintiff] turned to a new right-wing audience and became increasingly beholden to their priorities." In 2020, Plaintiff left Rolling Stone for Substack, a subscription-based newsletter service.

In 2022, Elon Musk purchased the social media website Twitter (now known as X). The Book states that Musk, in an effort "to expose the rot at the core of the entire company," sought out reporters to review internal company documents. These documents would purportedly "show[ ] how Twitter had responded to requests for censorship from the government and made decisions on questionable content." Musk eventually offered Plaintiff the opportunity to review the "Twitter Files," so long as he published his reporting on the platform.

On December 2, 2022, Plaintiff released his initial reporting on the Twitter Files. Among other things, Plaintiff reported on "Twitter's decision to suppress a New York Post article on [Hunter Biden's laptop] in advance of the 2020 election," and that the "Trump Administration routinely demanded material be taken down" by Twitter,.

The Book asserts that due to the increased exposure Plaintiff gained from the Twitter Files project, Plaintiff's "Twitter account blew up, and his Substack—already incredibly successful—gained thousands of subscriptions." The Book also claims that Plaintiff's Twitter Files reporting "generated a financial windfall." Plaintiff pleads, however, that "during the second and third months of the project, [he] experienced 4,844 subscriber cancellations and a $20,644 loss in revenue, as readers [of his Substack] became frustrated that [he] was publishing his work on another platform." Altogether, 13.7% of Plaintiff's Substack subscribers joined after publication of his Twitter Files reporting.

In 2023, Musk asked Plaintiff to leave Substack and move to his new "Twitter Subs" platform., where Musk claimed that Plaintiff would "get far more subscribers." According to the Book, Musk made the offer after he instituted "a blanket search ban on Twitter of all Substack links." Higgins, supra at 195. Plaintiff refused Musk's offer, stating that "people would say I'm essentially an employee of Twitter and both of us would never hear the end of it" and that "the optics would be really bad, journalistic ethics-wise." Plaintiff alleges that after refusing Musk's offer, Musk immediately kicked him off of the Twitter Files project and Plaintiff's Twitter following was "frozen and deamplified."

On February 2, 2025, Higgins requested an interview with Plaintiff to discuss the yet to be published Book. Specifically, Higgins framed the interview as an opportunity to discuss "how [Plaintiff's] audience changed and, more broadly, how [Plaintiff] see[s] the left/right political landscape." Plaintiff declined with the message, "Lol. Pass."

Bold Type Books published the Book on February 4, 2025. Plaintiff alleges that following publication, Higgins admitted that the Book does not contain evidence of a direct financial deal between Plaintiff and Musk….

Plaintiff sued for defamation, focusing on the following statements (allegedly defamatory material set in bold by the court):

  1. "Owned."
  2. "Bought."
  3. "Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi's decades-long journey from the world of alternative journalism into the snug patronage of billionaires is a story with profound and troubling implications for the future of journalism and unfettered thinking."
  4. "In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence. Their cronies are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi….
  5. "Owned follows the money, names names, and offers a chilling portrait of a future social media and news landscape."
  6. "It is a biting expose of journalistic greed, tech-billionaire ambition, and a lament for a disappearing free press." ..
  7. "Taibbi's Twitter Files reporting is a perfect example: he spent decades building up credibility and credentials only to, in one high-profile moment, cash in to launder a CEO's cherry-picked corporate opposition file on his opponents."
  8. "His Twitter account blew up, and his Substack—already incredibly successful—gained thousands of subscriptions. The reporting generated a financial windfall for the writer, even if its findings were dismissed by more sober commentators."
  9. "His Substack had exploded after the Twitter Files reporting and he'd promised to continue exposing censorship of the social media site."
  10. "It was this threat to Taibbi's bottom line that finally motivated the journalist to act."
  11. "After years of confrontational commentary on the financial industry and questioning the mainstream, Taibbi fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power late in 2022."

The court concluded that, in context, the statements were opinion and not actionable:

Statements 1 and 2, the words "Owned" and "Bought" on the Book's front cover, are susceptible to both literal and metaphorical meanings depending on the surrounding context. Plaintiff acknowledges, however, that the contents of the Book cannot support a literal reading, stating that the "[t]he Book contains no evidence of any financial transaction, payment, contract, or quid pro quo involving Plaintiff."

In this context, "Owned" and "Bought" naturally read as attention-grabbing rhetoric used to signify Higgin's opinions and the Book's conclusions. Aside from the scattered words and phrases discussed below, Plaintiff does not dispute the accuracy of the vast majority of the Book's factual content that informs these views or point to language suggesting the opinions are based on facts other than those disclosed in the book. Plaintiff may not like Higgins's subjective conclusions, or agree with their accuracy, but that does not make them actionable defamation.

Statement 3, that Plaintiff was in "the snug patronage of billionaires," is also a nonactionable opinion. Just like "Owned" and "Bought," the language "snug patronage" does not have a readily understood precise meaning, so there is no way for a reader to determine whether the statement is true or false. The statement also appears as a reviewer comment on the back cover under the heading "Praise for Owned." From this context, a reader would likely intuit this statement as an opinion of the reviewer, supported by the facts disclosed in the Book, and not a statement of fact about Plaintiff.

Statement 4 is a passage from the Book's left flap that states that Plaintiff was one of the right-wing technology billionaires' "cronies." Courts in this district have previously held that calling someone a "crony," without more, is nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole. The same is true here. The assertion that Plaintiff is a billionaire's crony is the sort of excessive, unverifiable language that signals to a reasonable reader that they are reading the speaker's opinion, and not a statement of fact.

Statement 5 also appears on the left flap and states that the Book "follows the money, names names," and is a "biting expose of journalistic greed." Plaintiff alleges that "follows the money" and "names names" "represents to readers that the author has traced actual financial relationships and identified specific recipients of improper payments or patronage." "In New York, a plaintiff cannot sustain a libel claim if the allegedly defamatory statement is not 'of and concerning plaintiff but rather only speaks about a group of which the plaintiff is a member." Statement 5 does not indicate that it is "of and concerning" Plaintiff—it describes Higgins's investigative process for ail the Book's subjects, not only Plaintiff. A reasonable reader would, therefore, not interpret "follows the money" and "names names" as a false statement of fact about Plaintiff.

Statement 6 states that the Book is an "expose of journalistic greed," which Plaintiff alleges "asserts professional dishonesty and unethical conduct." But whether someone is motivated out of greed or ambition is a subjective determination that is not capable of being proven true or false. Further, the context surrounding the statement, including its placement on the left flap of the Book's cover, clearly implies that the facts on which this opinion is based can be found within the Book.

Plaintiff acknowledges that these statements "might be protected opinion standing alone." But he claims that when viewed together, the statements on the Book's cover and jacket "become implied factual assertions that the accused was actually paid." Plaintiff is correct that otherwise nonactionable statements may create "false suggestions, impressions, and implications," and that these false implications can serve as the basis of a defamation claim. But plaintiffs alleging defamation by implication must "make a rigorous showing that the language of the communication as a whole can be reasonably read both to impart a defamatory inference and to affirmatively suggest that the author intended or endorsed that inference."

Even assuming that Plaintiff has affirmatively alleged a defamation by implication claim—despite not labeling his sole cause of action as such—Plaintiff has failed to allege facts showing that Defendants intended or endorsed the defamatory inference. As stated above, Plaintiff admits that "the Book contains no evidence whatsoever that Plaintiff received payments, sponsorship, or financial inducement from Elon Musk or any other billionaire."

Instead of endorsing the alleged defamatory implication, the Book argues that Plaintiff's central reason for agreeing to participate in the Twitter Files was to "gain access." Plaintiff also claims that Higgins "admitted contemporaneously that readers expecting proof of who was 'bought' would be disappointed." In short, the Book's contents and Higgins contemporaneous statements distance the Book from the defamatory implication Plaintiff alleges. Without any additional facts pointing to Defendants' intent, Plaintiff's defamation by implication claim fails….

The alleged defamatory statements within the Book are also nonactionable. First, in statement 7, "cash in" and "launder" are directly preceded by a reference to the "decades" Plaintiff spent "building up credibility and credentials." This context makes clear that the Book's reference to "cash in" is not referring to literal money, but rather the idea that Plaintiff traded his reputation for access to the Twitter Files. This sort of loose, figurative language would naturally lead a reasonable reader to interpret this as a statement of opinion.

Similarly, statement 8 is a nonactionable subjective determination, Statement 8 claims that Plaintiff's Substack "gained thousands of subscriptions" following his work on the Twitter Files, which translated to a "financial windfall." But as Plaintiff's counsel acknowledged during oral argument, this statement, "in the abstract," is not defamatory because it does not tend to injure Plaintiff's reputation. And even if one could read a defamatory meaning into these words, Plaintiff admits that he did in fact gain thousands of Substack subscribers following the Twitter Files reporting. Whether this "small percentage" of increased subscribers represented a "financial windfall" is a subjective determination.

Statements 9, 10 and 11 are also nonactionable opinions. Statement 9 claims that Plaintiff's Substack "exploded" following the Twitter Files. Just like the term "financial windfall," whether something "exploded" in value is a subjective determination. Finally, neither Statement 10, which states that Plaintiff was motivated by a "threat to [his] bottom line," or Statement 11, which claims that "Plaintiff fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power late in 2022," are capable of being proven true or false. What motivated Plaintiff to leave Twitter and whether he adequately challenged power are matters of opinion….

Liz McNamara and Leena Charlton (Davis Wright Tremaine LLP) represent defendants.

The post Court Dismisses Matt Taibbi's Defamation Lawsuit Over "<i>Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left</i>" appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Jacob Sullum https://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/ jsullum@reason.com <![CDATA[ Whatever Evidence the DOJ Has Against James Comey, It Cannot Transform '86 47' Into a Death Threat ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380700 2026-05-06T20:59:50Z 2026-05-06T20:30:53Z Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche against a backdrop of a picture of James Comey, Comey's 86 47 seashell display, and legal documents | Illustration: Adani Samat, Midjourney. Photo: Mattie Neretin /CNP/Mega/RSSIL/Newscom

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says an 11-month investigation produced "a body of evidence" that supports the federal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey, which improbably charges him with publicly threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump. That evidence, Blanche said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press last Sunday, goes beyond the May 15 Instagram post at the center of the case, which shared a photograph of seashells arranged in the sand to form the message "86 47"—a common expression of opposition to the president.

Although Blanche declined to specify the nature of that additional evidence, he said it would prove the "intent" required to convict Comey. That seems highly doubtful, especially when it comes to the first count in the indictment, which charges Comey with violating 18 USC 871 by "knowingly and willfully" making "a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States."

Comey did that, according to the indictment, by "publicly post[ing] a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram" that "depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out '86 47,' which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States." The question of how "a reasonable recipient" would understand that message is constitutionally crucial under Supreme Court decisions that delineate the distinction between "true threats" and protected speech.

Given the typical slang usage of eighty-six, which broadly means "reject," "discard," or "abandon," and the ubiquity of the specific slogan at issue here, which appears on a wide variety of T-shirts and bumper stickers you could order from Amazon right now if you were so inclined, it strains credulity to posit that the phrase is reasonably interpreted as a murder threat. Nor is that the only problem with this charge.

To convict Comey under Section 871, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he "knowingly and willfully" threatened violence against the president. That requirement goes beyond the sort of subjective intent that the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment requires to treat an allegedly threatening statement as a crime.

In the 2023 case Counterman v. Colorado, the Court said "a mental state of recklessness is sufficient," meaning the government "must show that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence." The standard under Section 871 is stricter: It requires proving that the defendant not only "consciously disregarded a substantial risk" that his statement would be viewed as a threat of violence but intended that it be understood as such.

In the 2004 case United States v. Fuller, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit held that a defendant can be convicted of violating Section 871 even if he does not intend to act on his threat. But it said the government must "establish that the communicator knowingly and willfully made a threat," meaning he "intend[ed] it to be received as a serious threat, regardless of whether he intended to carry it out."

The other count in the Comey indictment is based on 18 USC 875, which makes it a felony to transmit an interstate communication that contains "any threat to injure the person of another." Unlike Section 871, that provision does not specify that the defendant must make a threat "knowingly and willfully." But under Counterman, prosecutors would still have to prove that Comey "consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence."

By itself, the Instagram post does not come close to establishing the elements of either crime, as even Comey's critics have noted. In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) described Comey as "a political hack" and "the biggest disappointment of my Senate career." Despite his low opinion of Comey, Tillis thinks the case against him looks like "a vindictive prosecution" because "86 47" cannot plausibly be considered a death threat. "I can't find any evidence where '86' is used as a call for violence," he said. "It better be more than just the picture. There have to be facts and circumstances beyond that to convince me."

There is "more than just the picture," according to Blanche. "I am not permitted to get into the details of what the grand jury heard or found," he said on Meet the Press. "But rest assured that it's not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted."

The slogan "86 47" is "posted constantly," Blanche conceded. "That phrase is used constantly. There are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course. There are facts, there are circumstances, there are investigations that have to take place. "

According to Blanche, all uses of "that phrase" qualify as "threatening statements against President Trump," which means everyone who wears an "86 47" T-shirt or displays an "86 47" bumper sticker is potentially guilty of violating Section 871. He says "investigations" are necessary to determine whether that charge is appropriate. Yet the FBI cannot and does not launch an investigation every time someone uses "that phrase," which raises the question of why Comey was singled out.

Given President Donald Trump's frequently expressed antipathy toward Comey and his public demand that the Justice Department find a crime to pin on him, the answer seems pretty clear. Blanche insisted that Trump "wants justice," not revenge. But that motivation does not explain why the government decided to conduct the 11-month investigation that Blanche described, which initially was based on nothing more than an Instagram post of a slogan that "is used constantly."

Gliding over that point, Blanche said the investigation turned up "witnesses," "documents," and "materials" that will be used to "prove intent." But it is hard to imagine how such evidence could establish that "a reasonable recipient" would view the Instagram post as a death threat, let alone that Comey either intended that it be understood as such or recklessly disregarded the supposedly "substantial" risk that it would be.

The first issue hinges on how "86 47" is reasonably understood. Is it reasonable to assume that Republicans who advertised their politics by wearing "86 46" T-shirts or displaying "86 46" stickers during the Biden administration were threatening to kill the president? If not, it is plainly not reasonable to interpret "86 47" that way. No evidence collected by the FBI or federal prosecutors is going to refute that point. Yet that is what the government must do to treat Comey's Instagram post as a "true threat."

Leaving aside that seemingly insurmountable obstacle, what sort of evidence could the government possibly have that would elucidate Comey's state of mind when he posted the seashell photo? Maybe Comey confessed to someone, contrary to what he publicly said after he deleted the picture in response to criticism, that he always knew "some folks associate those numbers with violence." Maybe there are "documents" indicating that Comey "knowingly and willfully" threatened to kill the president in the hope that the resulting controversy would goose his book sales. But probably not.

During a press conference on the day of the indictment, Blanche portrayed the case against Comey as typical of the charges that the Justice Department commonly pursues against people who threaten public officials. "Over the past year, this department has charged dozens of cases involving threats against all sorts of individuals," he said. "We take these seriously, every single one of them."

That is obviously not true if you think people who post, wear, or display the message "86 47" are all making "threatening statements against President Trump." As Blanche concedes, those people typically are not investigated, let alone indicted. And when people do face charges under Section 871 or Section 875(c), the cases tend to look quite different from this one.

Trying to support his claim that the Comey indictment is business as usual at the Justice Department, Blanche cited a recent case in the Northern District of Florida involving a Tallahassee man, Diego M. Villavicencio, who pleaded guilty to two counts of sending interstate threats. The evidence included X posts saying Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell "will be shot and killed September 23" and adding that "Jerome is next." Villavicencio also had threatened Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.) in an X post, saying, "I'll kill you and your family and you won't do anything about it. Corruption listens to bullets." He followed that up with a direct message to Swalwell saying, "You are going to be shot and killed on September 24." In a 4chan post, Villavicencio announced his plan to drive by Mar-a-Lago and "take a couple of shots at trump and some of the other corrupt plutocrats."

Blanche also mentioned a case "where the defendant pled guilty recently to threatening former President Biden." He may have been referring to Troy Kelly, a Crown Point, New York, resident who last August "admitted that in May 2024 he posted a threat to kill President Biden on a social media website and that he intended it to be understood as a threat." Kelly had responded to one of Biden's posts by warning that he was "gonna put a bullet in your head if I ever catch you."

In another recent case, a Pennsylvania man, Shawn Monper, was charged last year with violating Section 875(c) by making threats on YouTube. "When are we going to stand up and kill these people?" he asked in one video. "That's why Trump needs to die," he said in another. "I have bought several guns and [have] been stocking up on ammo since Trump got in office," he reported, later announcing that "I'm gonna assassinate him myself."

According to an indictment filed three months ago in the Northern District of Ohio, Shannon Mathre was similarly clear about his intentions when he threatened Vice President J.D. Vance. "I am going to find out where he is going to be and use my M14 automatic gun and kill him," Mathre allegedly said, prompting a charge under Section 871, which covers threats against the vice president as well as the president.

Comey, by contrast, posted a photo of seashells "arranged in a pattern making out '86 47'"—a phrase that Blanche concedes is commonly used by Trump critics who never face federal charges. "In the typical case," former federal prosecutor Alexis Loeb told The Hill, you "wouldn't see threats that are readily open to nonviolent interpretations."

One of these cases is clearly not like the others. Yet Blanche insists that Comey's Instagram post is legally indistinguishable from the explicit threats made by defendants like Villavicencio and Kelly.

Although the Comey indictment is "unique" and "stands out because of the name of the defendant," Blanche told reporters last week, "his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute." In reality, the case against Comey "stands out" not just because the defendant is famous but also because his purported death threat was actually political speech protected by the First Amendment.

The post Whatever Evidence the DOJ Has Against James Comey, It Cannot Transform '86 47' Into a Death Threat appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Meagan O'Rourke https://reason.com/people/meagan-orourke/ meagan.orourke@reason.com <![CDATA[ A Dispatch From the AI Psychosis Summit ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380723 2026-05-06T19:06:02Z 2026-05-06T19:06:02Z A photo from the AI Psychosis Summit overlaid with a closeup of a phone screen | Meagan O'Rourke/Reason

When I arrived at last week's AI Psychosis Summit in New York City, I found no group therapy sessions or zen gardens, only a DJ, a room full of builders, and a cooler of Diet Cokes. 

The event was held in the remnants of a shuttered bank in Chinatown. While still outside, I could see through the graffiti-stained window white lines of code projected on a hanging screen. Pasted by the entryway were AI psychosis memes, their connections mapped with red string.  

AI psychosis memes connected by red string were pasted by the entryway. (Meagan O'Rourke/Reason)

Around the edges of the room, vibe coders and builders stood at tables, like eager students ready for show-and-tell. Beside them were computers and TVs displaying their digital creations. 

The "summit," organized by tech-optimists Macy Gettles, Wesam Jawich, Matt Van Ommeren, and Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez, was intended to showcase AI passion projects. AI psychosis, Van Ommeren told me, "evades definition," but the term is a way to acknowledge being "confused about your relationship with AI."

"We can't navigate it, and so we need some very general and jokey way to confront it," he said. "So we just say AI psychosis just [to] dismiss reckoning with it."

Event organizer Mauricio Trujillo Ramirez displayed his art installation inspired by a Yousuke Yukimatsu DJ set. (Meagan O'Rourke/Reason)

Although San Francisco may seem like the natural place to host an AI Psychosis Summit, Van Ommeren told me he was determined to have the event in New York, at the "intersection of art and technology." 

"I think some of the impetus behind it is that we were going to AI events that felt really corporate, and people were just showing tooling, and they were talking about optimizing their work stuff," Van Ommeren said. "Honestly, that's not interesting to me. I wanted to find people who are artists or doing something crazy and weird or frivolous." 

The projects were, in fact, far from corporate productivity tools. One presenter, Joshua Wolk, created a subway map that produces jazz music using the locations of different New York City trains—each train "plays" a different instrument. Another participant, Tanisha Joshi, built a website called The Cosmic Quant, which gives astrology-backed investment advice. Think of it like "Co-Star meets Robinhood," she told me. 

An attendee shows off his metaverse-inspired creation called "MyAiGuys." (Meagan O'Rourke/Reason)

One attendee, who did not have a booth, carried around his tablet and a phone, giving guerrilla presentations of his bespoke metaverse full of AI avatars with celebrity faces on little Sim-like bodies. It looked like a deranged Mii Plaza. The purpose of the program was as silly as the appearance of its characters: content creation in the off-brand metaverse. 

Another creator, who goes by "yung algorithm," presented an AI prank calling system. He said he calls people who are "scammers" or "selling stuff online" and livestreams the interactions. 

"All the frontier AI models are really bad at feeling human. They're only good at booking stuff," he said. "That's why I prank phone call hundreds of people a day, because I want to sharpen my sword on making that interaction feel actually human."

AI enthusiasts, vibe coders and Diet Coke drinkers packed the event space in Chinatown. (Meagan O'Rourke/Reason)

In the back of the room, two game designers demoed a horror game set in Central Park that drives players into a state of AI psychosis. The game's designers, who introduced themselves as @jacobdotsoul and Josh Wilson, said they built their game in a manic flurry, fueled by "a case of beers" and "a case of Celsius." 

"It's both a critique of an AI and an example of its worst excesses," Wilson said. 

Cory Etzkorn, an attendee, told me he went "actually crazy" while working on launching a dating app over the winter. Etzkorn was physically ill, cooped up at home, and surrounded by AI agents conversing with him about his startup and his symptoms. 

"I kind of forgot how to be in the real world," he said.

Etzkorn does not think technology alone causes AI psychosis, but being isolated and only interacting with Large Language Models (LLM) could induce some form of mental illness.

"The AI psychosis thing is sort of a joke, but I think a lot of people have actually experienced it to some degree," Etzkorn said. "I feel like every good joke is based on some reality." 

Was the AI Psychosis Summit a hyper-online stunt or a wholesome vibe coder meetup? It was both. Despite all the supposed atomization brought on by screens, clearly, enough people were able to overcome "AI psychosis" to pack a downtown event space on a weeknight. And for much of the evening, a line stretched out the door. 

The post A Dispatch From the AI Psychosis Summit appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Reem Ibrahim https://reason.com/people/reem-ibrahim/ <![CDATA[ No One Can Define 'Ultra-Processed Food.' Why Is RFK Jr. Trying To Regulate It? ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380719 2026-05-06T21:58:08Z 2026-05-06T18:35:42Z RFK Jr. speaks at a microphone while Trump looks on in the background | Gage Skidmore/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to crack down on ultra-processed foods, a key policy priority of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. The biggest obstacle standing in his way? Figuring out what an ultra-processed food is.

"By April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods," RFK Jr. promised on The Joe Rogan Experience in February. "Every food in your grocery store will have a label on it—it'll have maybe a green light, red light, or yellow light, telling you whether or not it's going to be good for you."

The agency is now weeks behind this deadline, and appears to be no closer to landing on a definition. As The New York Times recently reported, "behind the scenes…the process of defining ultraprocessed foods is still very much in the air. Agencies are struggling to agree, and it is unclear when a definition will be released."

"It's not final until it's final," Calley Means, a senior adviser to RFK Jr., told the Times. Means added that the definition would include the combined consultation of scientists, agency staff, and other stakeholders.

One widely cited definition of ultra-processed foods that the agency could adopt is the Nova system, developed at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Nova defines these foods as "industrially created…with the addition of multiple ingredients that may include some [unprocessed] ingredients," which are naturally occurring foods like milk, eggs, and meat that have "no added salt, sugar, oils, or fats." Ultra-processed foods also include "additives to enhance the taste and/or convenience of the product." This includes foods that are usually not considered unhealthy, such as bread, packaged meat, fish, and vegetables, and baby formulas.

The primary issue with creating a definition so broad is that it does not tell consumers which ingredients are supposedly causing health problems. Experts themselves are regularly struggling to classify foods in the Nova system because it relies on "descriptive criteria" and does not "allow for robust and functional food assignments."

For example, plain yogurt has been classified as minimally processed—a term that describes foods that have had sugar, oil, or salt added to them to increase shelf life or enhance taste—but the Nova definition states that nonalcoholic fermentation, the process by which yogurt is made, is characteristic of processed foods. Similarly, foods containing whole grains—like bread and cereal—are categorized as ultra-processed, but consuming them is associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease.

"Defining ultra-processed foods is like defining what's a car and what's a truck," Jeffrey Singer, a physician and general surgeon, tells Reason. "'Ultra-processed' and 'processed' are too broad, too ambiguous, and should be abandoned."

"If we're interested in knowing what is in food that can harm us," he adds, "we should get much more granular and study the specific ingredients…and the dosage amounts."

Indeed, this is what is often missed in the food regulation debate: While it is common knowledge that it is best to avoid large amounts of saturated fats, occasionally eating so-called ultra-processed foods is not the death sentence that some politicians are making it out to be. How healthy a food is has less to do with the method in which the food is produced and more to do with its calorie density and nutritional content. For instance, the calories in a cheeseburger come mostly from the beef, bun, and cheese, not from the preservatives in the ketchup.

Labeling foods with a green, red, or yellow light based on these dubious definitions may discourage consumers from eating foods that are actually good for them. For instance, some studies suggest that excluding some ultra-processed foods, such as breads and breakfast cereals, may lead to "lowered intakes of key nutrients," which would be particularly concerning for at-risk groups, such as women of childbearing age.

Meanwhile, the added costs of new labeling requirements are likely to be passed down to consumers, which could price some people out. Already, MAHA food policies in some states are expected to add billions of dollars in costs to grocery stores and consumers in "the short term," according to a recent analysis by the Policy Navigation Group.

"There are trade-offs that matter," says Singer. "I might want to take my chances on a food that is also processed with certain ingredients that, taken in large quantities, might cause me harm, but starvation can cause me even greater harm."

The MAHA campaign against ultra-processed foods has all the hallmarks of a modern policy fad: vague definitions, exaggerated claims, dubious science, and total confidence that more regulation must be the answer. If politicians cannot even agree on what ultra-processed means, it raises the question of whether they have any business regulating it.

The post No One Can Define 'Ultra-Processed Food.' Why Is RFK Jr. Trying To Regulate It? appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> John Stossel https://reason.com/people/john-stossel/ <![CDATA[ The War on Data Centers Is Here—and It Doesn't Add Up ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380735 2026-05-06T18:14:53Z 2026-05-06T18:20:51Z John Stossel holds a phone with a data center as a backdrop | Stossel TV

Data centers are big buildings full of machines that process what we do on our phones and computers.

AI requires even more computing power, so companies are eager to build more data centers.

The usual suspects are freaking out.

"We must stop it!" says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.).

"Slow it down!" demands Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.).

Data centers do use lots of power and water to cool them down because their computers generate heat. One center can use as much power and water as a small town.

"Uses resources like a madman!" says one protester in my new video.

Last year, protesters blocked or stalled at least 48 projects.

One fired 13 bullets at an Indiana politician's home because he supports data centers.

Now AOC and Bernie Sanders have introduced a bill that will pause new center construction.

That's just dumb.

"If our economy was allowed to develop at the speed of Bernie Sanders, we would be significantly worse off," says Paige Lambermont of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

"If we slow down, other countries are not going to. You're going to be getting the authoritarian Chinese version of AI rather than the United States innovators' version of AI."

She downplays fears about rising electricity prices.

So far, "it's raised prices nowhere," adds Lambermont. "Prices in Virginia are rising more slowly than some other places, even though more data centers are in Northern Virginia than anywhere else."

The Institute for Energy Research found "no statistically significant relationship between data center concentration and faster increases in electricity rates."

Still, as demand for AI increases, there will be price increases. But that's mostly because short-sighted politicians have limited our use of the most efficient fuels, like natural gas and nuclear power, favoring wind and solar power.

"If we hadn't done that," says Lambermont, "we probably would have between 100 and 200 gigawatts of slack capacity in the power grid already."

Part of the problem: Government rules that say only government, or a government-approved business, may produce and sell power.

And government's monopolies are unbelievably slow.

Microsoft now suffers from that because it struck a deal with Constellation Energy to reopen the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island.

The renovated plant will be able to produce power next year, but our government won't allow Microsoft to use that power until other utilities build power lines in other states—often hundreds of miles away.

Government rules stop so much progress.

A company could avoid burdensome rules by building a plant for itself, off the grid.

Elon Musk did that, setting up gas turbines to power his supercomputer in Tennessee.

"If you're Elon Musk, you can build your own," notes Lambermont, "but most people can't afford to build a gas or nuclear plant."

Even if they could, why would they invest billions when the next politicians in power might be socialist luddites?

"No one wants to invest [billions] in something that the next presidential administration could come in and say, 'Actually, it's been illegal the whole time,'" sighs Lambermont.

Some in Congress now want to make building off-grid power easier.

"You can do new and interesting things if you're running your own thing and making your own rules." says Lambermont. "That's pretty much how every major technological advance we've had in other areas has come about. It's never been the government that comes up with the advancement. It's usually private actors doing interesting things and trying to figure out what works….[Data centers] are resource intensive, but so are most productive things we've done in human history."

Usually, productive things happen only when government gets out of the way.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post The War on Data Centers Is Here—and It Doesn't Add Up appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Eric Boehm https://reason.com/people/eric-boehm/ Eric.Boehm@Reason.com <![CDATA[ Republicans Want To Borrow Every Single Dollar of the $72 Billion Bill To Fund ICE and Trump's Ballroom ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380711 2026-05-06T20:33:07Z 2026-05-06T17:55:12Z The U.S. Capitol | Photo: Volodymyr Tverdokhlib

Senate Republicans have unveiled their plan to fund immigration enforcement and President Donald Trump's ballroom, and the proposal might take fiscal irresponsibility to a new record high.

The two bills included in the package call for spending nearly $72 billion. Remarkably, every single dollar would be borrowed.

That's according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the bill, which was released on Wednesday morning. According to the CBO, the bill would direct $38 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spend $26 billion on various programs run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The largest share of the CBP funding is $19.1 billion to allow the agency to "hire, pay, train, and equip border patrol agents, officers, and support staff," according to the CBO. Another $3.5 billion will fund screening efforts at the border.

The so-called reconciliation package is an attempt by Republicans to bypass Democratic opposition to funding immigration enforcement and Trump's planned new ballroom at the White House. The Senate's reconciliation process, which was created by the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1975, is supposed to give Congress a tool for controlling or reducing spending. Under the rules that typically govern reconciliation, any spending increases must be offset with cuts elsewhere.

In this case, however, reconciliation is being used to pass what is effectively a supplemental appropriation—but to do so by bypassing the filibuster, says William W. Beach, executive director of the Fiscal Lab on Capitol Hill.

"This is a precedent-setting move," and one that will likely be repeated in the future, Beach tells Reason. "I'm worried about it, because it gives almost unlimited spending authority to the majority."

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement that he was prepared to "vigorously challenge any provision" of the package that violates the Senate's rule governing the reconciliation process.

That process was "originally designed to make deficit reduction easier. Republicans are using it to make deficit expansion easier," wrote Dominik Lett, a fiscal policy analyst for the Cato Institute, in an email to Reason.

After reviewing the CBO's assessment, Lett confirmed that every single dollar in the spending bill will be borrowed. "They don't even attempt to include offsets," he wrote.

In addition to the funding for ICE and CPB, the package also includes $1 billion for the Secret Service. That will cover "enhanced security and upgrades" within the new East Wing of the White House, which includes Trump's planned ballroom.

Trump originally pitched the ballroom project as being "free" for taxpayers and promised that private donations would cover the full cost. That has swiftly changed. Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) said taxpayers would be expected to cover about $400 million for the ballroom.

With how quickly the ballroom's price tag is growing, it seems likely the $1 billion included in the reconciliation package will soon be deemed insufficient.

Of course, saying that "taxpayers" are paying for the ballroom is a bit inaccurate. Taxpayers aren't directly paying for any of this, because the whole cost of the bill—the ICE funding, the ballroom, and the assorted other things included here—is simply being added to the national debt.

That is actually worse. If lawmakers believe the American people should have to pay for Trump's ballroom or for enhanced immigration enforcement, they should have the courage to propose tax increases that will cover the cost, or cut spending in other parts of the budget as offsets.

The CBO's analysis of the package does not include a summary of how the added borrowing will increase interest costs in future years. However, according to the CBO's calculator, the additional spending in the reconciliation bill will add $26 billion in borrowing costs over the next 10 years.

That brings the final price tag of this package to nearly $100 billion, once the interest costs are included.

The timing is particularly galling too. Last month, America's national debt surpassed the size of the nation's economy for the first time since the end of World War II.

If ever there was a time for lawmakers to get serious about limiting the growth of America's national debt, it is now. Instead, the Republican reconciliation bill is doing the exact opposite.

The post Republicans Want To Borrow Every Single Dollar of the $72 Billion Bill To Fund ICE and Trump's Ballroom appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Michael Auslin https://reason.com/people/michael-auslin/ auslin@stanford.edu <![CDATA[ The Spirit of the Declaration, Part 2 ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8377640 2026-05-01T16:00:37Z 2026-05-06T17:36:50Z

[This post is excerpted from the new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).]

To the delegates of the Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence did not reflect abstract ideas. To begin with, it was a pressing piece of administrative business after the vote for Independence on July 2, necessary for legitimizing the American struggle against King and Parliament, as well as a means of garnering foreign support, primarily from France. Yet it also was a covenant invoking the Creator and identifying a people that it hoped to unite. This covenant was instituted to defend against tyranny and maintain a specific political community in its traditional rights. Its sanction came from a righteous cause, and as Congress began to edit Thomas Jefferson's draft on July 2 and 3, it found itself not only tightening his argument, but also making more explicit the divine sanction that underpinned the document.

Grounded in natural rights theory, English common law, classical thought, and Judeo-Christian theology, the Declaration expressed the specific kinds of liberty and equality understood by eighteenth-century men of property and learning. It eloquently asserted the traditional liberties of Englishmen, drawing the distinction between positive rights granted by governments and natural rights derived from God. This was a defense of man "in virtue of his nature," as later expressed by the political philosopher Harry Jaffa. The Declaration described rights that could not be "alienated" or surrendered to any person or government, especially one failing to uphold its responsibilities to the people it sought to control.

A document so radical as to indict a king and declare all men equal was also extremely conservative. Liberty seemed a straightforward idea, but equality was a far more complicated concept than Jefferson's famous phrase expressed. Equality was not an end in itself, but was a feature of liberty, in the sense that humans had equal rights that had to be protected. In the political sphere, equality was necessary to the preservation of those God-given liberties that were both individual and communal.

Such arguments in favor of equality were not absolute, especially when it came to the question of slavery. The most passionate section in Jefferson's draft was a long condemnation of the slave trade, though not of slavery itself, but with undeniable moral tones. Chattel slavery was deplored as both a political and a moral evil by almost all the Founding Fathers, including slaveholders like George Mason, who in 1765 had written that it was the cause of the "destruction" of the Roman republic, being "an Evil very pathetically described by Roman historians." Jefferson himself had written in his Summary View of the Rights of British America that "the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state." The hypocrisy of a slaveowning society demanding its own freedom had long been commented on in the colonies, often from the pulpit. It was well understood that holding fellow humans in bondage degraded both the enslaved and the enslaver, and Patrick Henry hoped for the time when the colonists would "abolish this lamentable evil."

Such laudable sentiments were not followed by action, nor did they spare the Americans from the barbed criticism of foreigners like the great Samuel Johnson, who famously asked, "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Yet in the interests of colonial unity, this passage was cut, to Jefferson's disgust. In cutting Jefferson's critique of the slave trade, Congress revealed the moral failing that would bedevil the new nation and eventually threaten its very survival.

What later generations would see as the silences, errors, or hypocrisy of the Declaration cannot detract from its bold, indeed revolutionary, nature. Jefferson's broad vision, largely unaltered by Congress, pointed toward freedoms not entirely brought into focus, but never lost sight of. In condemning the King, the Declaration condemned any who would trample on the liberty of others, even if it did not—could not—yet follow its own logic to the inevitable end. It thus served a double role: first, in making explicit the rights and claims of the political community in whose name it had been created; second, in providing a transcendent vision of both individual and communal life that would inspire groups and people who did not yet partake of all (or any) of the freedoms enumerated in the document. This "open door," so to speak, is what ultimately gave the Declaration its capaciousness and greatness, keeping it a living document in the minds of Americans of future generations.

Seen in its totality, the Declaration of Independence was audacious yet prudent, visionary yet sober. It was infused with a "spirit of pragmatic idealism," to borrow the words of the great historian Bernard Bailyn. Though a compromise among different regions and interests, the Declaration was far from reflecting the lowest common denominator. It expressed the mind of a growing society more dynamic than the mother country and the moral certitude of those who refused to accept subordination.

The post The Spirit of the Declaration, Part 2 appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Seconds https://reason.com/people/seconds/ <![CDATA[ How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380683 2026-05-06T14:10:56Z 2026-05-06T16:00:25Z Against a beige background, a collage of various images, including $100 bills, a human figure in black, dots, pixelated blues, and various scribbles and blots on paper documents. | Illustration: Lex Villena; Midjourney

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me.

It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer's. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn't know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her.

The rest of the time, she was afraid: waking up in an unfamiliar world, surrounded by people she'd never met, confused that she wasn't back home in Minnesota, where she'd grown up. It hit my mom the hardest. She did everything she could to take care of her own mother, watching the brilliant, kind woman she knew rot into a husk of her former self.

My grandmother died on Christmas Eve. As sad as it was, it was a blessing for my mom, who was finally freed from her duty of watching the woman she loved the most waste away.

The Alzheimer's Researcher Who Became a Poster Child for Academic Fraud

Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer's. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer's funding that year. Lesné was a star.

But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct? 

In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné's paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller's 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish.

When I first picked up that Science article, I hadn't considered academic fraud as something that was real and widespread. As I thought about it more, I was filled with a deep, bitter hatred. For his own pride, greed, and acclaim, this man had doomed millions of people like my grandmother to slow, horrible deaths and millions more like my mom to agonizing years as caregivers.

Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back. The system that was supposed to catch this—peer review, university compliance, journal editorial boards—failed repeatedly for years.

How Much Academic Literature Is Made Up?

Lesné was not a lone bad apple. The rot and corruption of academic research are systemic and structural. Daniele Fanelli's 2009 meta-analysis of survey data in PLOS One showed that approximately 2 percent of scientists self-reported fabrication or falsification—and 14 percent reported witnessing it in colleagues. Self-reports mark the floor, not the ceiling.

J.B. Carlisle's 2021 paper, "False individual patient data and zombie randomised controlled trials submitted to Anaesthesia," showed that out of 153 trials with individual patient data available, 44 percent had untrustworthy data and 26 percent were zombie trials animated entirely by false data. In a 2025 PNAS study, researchers estimated that the number of fraudulent publications is doubling every 1.5 years, while legitimate publications double every 15.

At least 400,000 papers published from 2000 through 2022 showed signs of coming from paper mills. Former BMJ editor Richard Smith asked, "Is it time to assume health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?" A 2015 Lancet comment by Richard Horton put it bluntly: "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

The Peer Review System Is Susceptible to Scientific Fraud

Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action explains why systems that everyone knows are broken continue. When the benefits of cheating are concentrated in a small group but the costs are distributed across a vast population, the cheaters organize and the victims don't.

Lesné captured millions of dollars in grants, plus tenure, prestige, and conference invitations. But the millions of Alzheimer's patients and families, the wasted taxpayer money, and the honest researchers who could have gotten those grants instead—they all suffered for those benefits. None was hurt directly enough to trace culpability, but they suffered nonetheless.

Academia suffers from second-order Olson problems. Peer reviewers are unpaid volunteers with no upside for catching fraud and with significant social downsides for making accusations. University administrators have concentrated incentives to protect grant-winning faculty. The University of Minnesota investigation took roughly two and a half years and produced only a single resignation: Lesné's. There were no legal consequences, no clawbacks.

The peer review process helps enable this fraud. The economist Bruce Yandle called it the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon: A group with strongly held moral beliefs will end up working with people interested in exploiting it financially. Self-righteous gatekeepers say peer review is required for integrity. As a byproduct, the publishing oligopoly extracts billions in profit by charging for access to taxpayer-funded research. Paper mills have become a shadow market worth, by one conservative estimate cited by Nature, hundreds of millions of dollars per year by publishing any slop they get their hands on, knowing that researchers desperate to publish would rather cheat than starve and that sociopaths would happily buy authorship with a credit card.

An entire extractive industry that charges universities to access their own faculty's work, failing at its literal one job: integrity in publishing.

The system actively selects for corruption. The goals of individual scientists—getting published and getting grants—are structurally misaligned with the goals of science itself: the pursuit of truth. The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 legally required public posting of clinical trial results on ClinicalTrials.gov. A 2015 New England Journal of Medicine analysis showed only 13.4 percent compliance in reporting summary results within the required 12-month window. The government has the authority to fine violators up to $10,000 per day; it could have collected $25 billion according to a 2015 STAT investigation. But it collected essentially nothing, because the agency doesn't want to fight the powerful institutions it regulates.

When institutional gatekeepers have failed, the answer is not yet more gatekeeping by corrupt watchers and underhanded dealers. It's radical transparency and the free exchange of information.

Science must be a free market of ideas, but now it's a cartel. NIH grant funding is centrally planned science. A small committee directs billions, yet is structurally incapable of knowing which directions are most promising.

Luckily for us, information wants to be free.

AI Can Empower Independent Scientists To Fight Academic Corruption

Professionalization and credentialism dominated science in the 20th century, suppressing independent research. But Charles Darwin was an amateur naturalist, Benjamin Franklin a printer, Michael Faraday a bookbinder. I believe the world is not only ready but eager for a new wave of citizen scientists, independent researchers, and curious minds to hunt through those monumental piles of data, to burn through corrupt and deceitful journals, and to replicate the most audacious claims in pursuit of truth.

It isn't intelligence or motivation that limit independent research. The biggest limit is the labor cost of accessing, reading, cross-referencing, and synthesizing enormous bodies of literature. The advent of incredibly powerful AI has collapsed that cost by orders of magnitude. A motivated researcher with a ChatGPT Pro subscription can do in an hour what previously required months, a research team, and institutional library access.

The remaining limits are rigor, access to data, and the ability to conduct experiments. That's where open infrastructure comes in, and that's what I'm helping build today.

An acquaintance on X once told me that no one is translating Chinese research preprints to English. I smirked in disbelief. "There is literally no way that's true," I thought—and yet I looked, and it was. Thousands of Chinese preprints sat entirely untranslated with no real reference. A ripe opportunity to do something important was in front of me, and I decided to go and pick the low-hanging fruit.

ChinaRxiv.org now has 26,000 high-quality translated preprints, with the goal of continuing to expose information, to make it so researchers with high integrity have access to absolutely everything they can get their hands on to do their best work. If artificial superintelligence arrives soon, it probably won't particularly care about what language any information is in—and as we train bigger and stronger models, getting information in datasets that are easily scrapable and accessible is a big win.

From there, a new opportunity emerged: Soviet-era Russian academic literature, a vast corpus of pre-1980s papers that were never translated into English. Through conversations on social media, I met some like-minded researchers and connected with the Research Revival Fund, sponsored by the Analogue Group. Together, we are getting ready to translate large stretches of previously untranslated Soviet academic papers.

There are entire research traditions in material science, theoretical physics, mathematics, and biology that were conducted in Russian but never entered the English scientific conversation. It's still sitting there, untranslated, waiting to be found and introduced to the world.

The Real Victims of Corrupt Science, Slow Research, and Constrained Information

The victims of corrupt science and siloed information never know they were harmed. The child who dies because her cure was delayed by a few years never knows the hurt that she received. The researchers who didn't get the grant for their novel idea because the cartel was funding their buddies on the backs of fraudulent graphs never knew they got screwed. In light of all this disappointment, we have a choice: Continue trusting failed institutions that are mired in corrupt incentive structures, or build a parallel world that routes around these gatekeepers. Let free information and free markets do what centrally planned science cannot, and let the best works survive.

Real people suffer and die when science is slow, when science is corrupt, when science is constrained. When you remove barriers to information and let individuals act on dispersed knowledge, you get outcomes no central planner could ever dream of.

The post How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Stuart Benjamin https://reason.com/people/stuart-benjamin/ <![CDATA[ Content Moderation and the First Amendment ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380709 2026-05-06T15:15:37Z 2026-05-06T15:15:37Z Back in 2013 I argued that under the Supreme Court's jurisprudence algorithmic editing is speech for First Amendment purposes, and in Moody v. NetChoice the Supreme Court squarely so stated, in the context of social media platforms' algorithmic prioritization of content.

Many people are unhappy about this jurisprudence, for understandable reasons. The invalidation of laws regulating websites' substantive algorithmic decisions is a striking, and arguably unsettling, prospect. Some of the critics argue for revamping First Amendment jurisprudence. That would extend far beyond the treatment of editorial choices, but others respond more directly to this jurisprudence – for example, treating social media platforms as state actors or common carriers.

In my forthcoming Content Moderation and the First Amendment, I discuss these possible responses designed to limit Moody, concluding that the strongest candidate is excluding from First Amendment coverage editorial judgments made by monopolists. Unlike the other possible responses, it avoids arbitrary distinctions and focuses on companies that, by hypothesis, lack significant competitors.

I also discuss a prominent possibility that would expand the Moody line of cases – that audience interests alone are sufficient to trigger First Amendment coverage, so that messages sent by AI without any meaningful human involvement (and thus no traditional speaker for First Amendment purposes) are treated as speech.

As I discuss in the conclusion, my inclination is not to adopt either of these possibilities. As to market power, I err on the side of avoiding ad hoc exceptions. And the prospect of protecting speech generated entirely by AI seems sufficiently transformative that I favor caution.

I end by suggesting that these issues will become more fraught insofar as social media platforms become more influential and the prospect of artificial general intelligence becomes more real. And cleavages in response to those two developments will likely better explain individuals' reactions to the treatment of algorithmic editorial decisions than more traditional First Amendment fault lines will. In this and in other areas, the ground is shifting beneath our feet, destabilizing current debates.

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]]> Elizabeth Nolan Brown https://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/ elizabeth.brown@reason.com <![CDATA[ Louisiana Says Men Are Spiking Women's Drinks With Abortion Pills. There's Scant Evidence of That. ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380660 2026-05-06T14:55:56Z 2026-05-06T15:00:38Z mifepristone pills | Soumyabrata Roy/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom/Midjourney

Men are spiking women's drinks with abortion pills and it's the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fault. At least that's Louisiana's contention in a case the Supreme Court is now eyeing.

But there's scant evidence to support Louisiana's fantastical claim.

Nor does the state's argument that in-person prescribing requirements could stop abortion-pill coercion really hold up under scrutiny. Women like Rosalie Markezich, the plaintiff at the center of this case, may certainly feel pressured by partners to take abortion pills. But fear of abuse doesn't stop at a doctor's door, and women with controlling or violent partners could still face reproductive coercion no matter how many prescribing rules are put in place.

The case concerns the FDA removing an in-person dispensing requirement for abortion pills. Remote prescribing and mail-order pills have become a last resort for abortion access in states with bans. This has made them a major target in ban states like Louisiana.

Last October, Louisiana and Markezich sued the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and various officials—including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—over the FDA's 2023 decision to do away with a requirement that mifepristone must be prescribed and dispensed in person. That decision made permanent a temporary allowance for mail-order prescriptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Louisiana alleges that "bad actors have been able to obtain FDA-approved abortion drugs from prescribers in other states and then secretly spike women's drinks without their knowledge."

But there simply isn't any evidence that anything like this is happening at any scale.

Notably, Louisiana does not cite even one such case in its complaint. It simply asserts that this happens and then moves on.

If this sort of thing were happening frequently, we would certainly know about it. These cases would make not just local news but headlines across the country. There would be prosecutions and lawsuits and trials.

But searching Google for stories of men spiking partners' drinks (or vitamins, or bodies, or anything else) with abortion pills since 2023 turns up only four potential cases out of Texas and three from elsewhere in the country (one in Massachusetts, one in Illinois, and one in Ohio). Some of these allegations are unproven, several took place in states where abortion is legal, and it's not clear in any of the cases how the pills were obtained and whether remote prescribing had anything to do with it.

A Heritage Foundation report from March turned up just three recent cases (the same ones included in my tally above) of abortion-pill drink spikings and had to reach all the way back to 2007 to come up with four more.

Louisiana also alleges that because of remote prescribing, bad actors have been able to force women—like Markezich—"into taking these drugs against their will."

Markezich lives in Louisiana, which has one of the nation's most strict abortion bans. In 2023, she was pregnant and "did not want to have an abortion," states her complaint. But "under immense pressure and fearing for her safety, Rosalie took abortion drugs that her boyfriend obtained via the U.S. Postal Service from a doctor in California."

A doctor cannot legally prescribe abortion pills to someone other than the person who intends to take them, so a partner procuring them would either have to swindle a doctor, find a dirty doctor, or pressure their partner into consenting during a telehealth visit.

Only one of those possibilities might be overcome by a return to in-person prescribing only. If a patient were required to meet with a doctor in person to take the pills, it would be difficult for a scheming partner to somehow trick the doctor. But there are other ways of obtaining pills deceptively. And a partner who is intimidating or abusive enough to coerce a partner's consent to take abortion pills or to remotely ask a doctor for them would likely still feel such pressure if a partner drove them to an abortion clinic.

In Markezich's case, she said her boyfriend's sister introduced him to a telehealth service where he used Markezich's contact information to fill out an online form, presumably pretending to be her. Markezich admits to paying for the pills herself, through her Venmo account, with money the boyfriend provided.

Markezich and Louisiana allege that if "Rosalie would have received the protection of a private in-person medical appointment," then she would have "been able to tell a doctor that she did not want an abortion" and "the drugs that took her baby's life would never have been provided."

Maybe that's so in Markezich's case. But I imagine many women in abusive relationships would still feel pressured to tell a doctor whatever their partner wanted them to, because leaving that clinic without taking the pills could still result in more abuse. If a woman was literally being held physically captive by an abusive partner and the abortion doctor visit was their only time away from captivity, maybe the visit would make a difference. But most women in abusive marriages and partnerships are bound to their partners by combinations of love, fear, financial ties, custody concerns, and so on—things that wouldn't go away just by getting to see a doctor alone.

Besides, an abusive partner intent on coercing an abortion will likely not give up just because pills couldn't be dispensed legally. They could still find a dirty doctor, or buy mifepristone on the black market, or resort to other means of attempting to induce or coerce an abortion. And some of those options could wind up much more dangerous for the pregnant partner.

The prospect of black-market pills is something that merits serious consideration. We know from experience that prohibition doesn't end access to a substance—especially when that substance is easily concealed and readily available in parts of the country. Prohibition just makes the whole situation more dangerous.

If mail-order pills are banned, sure, a few potentially abusive partners may be thwarted. But some will turn to black-market pills. And many, many more women seeking abortions will likely turn to black-market pills as well, putting themselves at risk of taking counterfeit or adulterated drugs that could be harmful and make them fearful of seeking help should complications arise.

Requiring in-person prescribing of abortion pills puts many more women in danger than it protects.

Noting that the FDA is actually in the process of reviewing its rules around abortion pills, a U.S. district court granted the federal government's motion to stay the case pending the FDA's review. "It is the completion of FDA's promised good faith, evidence-based, and expeditious review of the mifepristone REMS, not 'government by lawsuit,' that this Court finds to be in the public interest," wrote Judge David C. Joseph in an April 7 decision.

But Louisiana appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which granted its request to halt remote prescribing nationwide as the case plays out.

Two pharmaceutical companies—Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro—that are "intervenor defendants" in this case then asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay on the 5th Circuit's order.

The Supreme Court granted the abortion pill manufacturer's stay request, meaning the revocation of remote prescribing will not take effect just yet. An order signed by Justice Samuel Alito is in effect until early next week.

I am sorry for what Markezich allegedly went through, and, if true, her boyfriend should be punished—just as perpetrators should be punished in the rare cases involving drinks spiked with abortion pills. But the idea that situations like hers could be prevented if pills had to be prescribed in person—or that saving a few women from such situations is worth putting countless more at risk—just doesn't make sense.

In The News

The second phase of New Mexico putting Meta on trial is now underway. An expected three-week trial began Monday, in a case in which Meta—the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—is accused by New Mexico of being a "public nuisance."

"Typically, public nuisance cases weigh the impact of activities on shared physical commodities, such as air quality or public spaces — so-called 'public goods,'" notes Source NM. "The bench trial will thus determine if the state has the power to mitigate the effects of 'public health, welfare, or safety' in digital spaces."

Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in court on Monday that he would not "overreach" in this case and had "some concerns" about the state asking the court to mandate changes to Meta platforms. "I'm probably not the easiest sell on an idea where I would become a one-person legislature, judge and executive branch enforcer of administrative code provisions," Biedscheid said.

Florida sheriff continues to persecute sex workers for sport: Polk County, Florida, is notorious for conducting massive "human trafficking" stings that mostly just arrest sex workers and their clients, then displaying the results in the most gross and offensive ways. In the latest—which the sheriff's office dubbed "Polk Around and Find Out"—sheriff's deputies arrested 266 people, with the aid of the Department of Homeland Security, and put out a graphic with the mugshots of all the arrestees who receive public benefits. Nearly half of those arrested were sex workers. Another 108 people were arrested for solicitation of an undercover cop posing as an adult sex worker.

More Sex & Tech News

• Utah's attempt to ban virtual private networks takes effect today. How it goes could be a test case for more such laws in other states.

• The White House is reportedly considering a move to make AI models get government approval before they can be released.

The post Louisiana Says Men Are Spiking Women's Drinks With Abortion Pills. There's Scant Evidence of That. appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Matthew Petti https://reason.com/people/matthew-petti/ <![CDATA[ Trump's Bluff to Iran Didn't Work ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380666 2026-05-06T14:04:10Z 2026-05-06T14:04:10Z A container ship in the Strait of Hormuz | Illustration: Midjourney/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Wikimedia Commons

Project Freedom was over before it started. On Sunday night, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. military initiative to guide ships out of the Persian Gulf, where they have been trapped since the U.S.-Iranian war closed the Strait of Hormuz a month ago. On Tuesday night, Trump declared that Project Freedom was "paused" and the U.S. would keep up its blockade of Iranian ports.

The next morning, Trump confusingly wrote that the blockade will be lifted if "Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to, which is, perhaps, a big assumption," and threatened bombing "at a much higher level and intensity than it was before" if the deal falls through.

U.S. officials told Axios early on Wednesday morning that they are ready to accept a framework for new peace talks. Iran would gradually reopen the strait while the U.S. lifts its blockade, and both sides would have 30 days to negotiate a detailed agreement, which would restrict Iran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting U.S. economic sanctions. Disarming Iran's missile forces, which the Trump administration had named as a major war goal, does not seem to be on the table at all.

Those terms were the same ones that Iran had proposed last week. Trump rejected them just before announcing Project Freedom.

A lot has happened in the days since then. The U.S. Navy escorted a ship through the strait and sank several Iranian speedboats harassing shipping. Iran bombed an oil export terminal in the United Arab Emirates and shot a cruise missile at a cargo ship trying to pass through Hormuz, wounding several Filipino sailors. The shipping industry simply did not trust U.S. assurances. Zero ships transited the strait on Tuesday, and dozens of ships actually sailed further away from the strait.

"The security of shipping and energy transport has been jeopardized by the United States and its allies by violating the ceasefire and imposing a blockade," Iranian Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the country's head negotiator, stated when Project Freedom began. After it ended, the Iranian navy announced the possibility of "safe, stable passage" through the strait under "new protocols." A new Iranian government website was created for ship owners to pay ransom.

Despite telling Americans to be patient with the war, Trump himself has been fairly impatient. From the beginning of the war through the current ceasefire, he has repeatedly tried to find one weird trick that will make Iranian leaders fold instantly, saying publicly and privately that it will only take a few days. Iranian leaders, feeling cornered, have instead responded by escalating in return. The result has been a choice between counterescalating at an increasing cost to the U.S. or making concessions to Iran that Trump said he would not make.

After the first round of peace talks in early April didn't get the results he wanted, Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to turn back all shipping out of Iranian ports. The goal was not only to cut off Iran's export revenues, but also to force it to shut off its oil wells, a process that could cause permanent damage. Trump's advisers clearly gave him an overly optimistic timeline. "They say they only have about three days left before that happens. And when it explodes, you can never rebuild it the way it was," Trump told Fox News two weeks ago.

While the blockade is doing real damage to Iranians' livelihoods and has led Iran to cut oil production, it didn't cause the catastrophic collapse within days that Trump was promised. Iran experienced a similar export cut during the coronavirus pandemic and spent the last half-decade overhauling its infrastructure in preparation for another shut-in situation. Still, Trump was confident enough to turn down Iran's proposal this weekend and try reopening Hormuz by force.

"I will soon be reviewing the plan that Iran has just sent to us, but can't imagine that it would be acceptable in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years," Trump said on Saturday. He wanted Iran to surrender on vengeful terms.

Project Freedom instead made the shipping situation in the strait more uncertain and gave Iran a chance to assert its control again. Most alarmingly for countries in the region, the Trump administration declared that Iran bombing the United Arab Emirates was not a ceasefire violation. Less than two hours later, Iranian forces fired at the United Arab Emirates again.

At this point, the 30-day proposal for peace talks is not a bad deal for the United States. It would stop the immediate threat to Americans' well-being (the closure of the strait) and create a path to resolving the long-term risk to world security (Iran's nuclear program). But the latter problem was something Iran was already willing to negotiate away before the war, and the former problem didn't exist at all. Thousands of lives and millions of livelihoods were destroyed to get back to square one.

"Our preference is for these straits to be opened to the way they're supposed to be open, back to the way it was: Anyone can use it, no mines in the water, nobody paying tolls," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday. "That's what we have to get back to and that's the goal here."

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]]> Jacob Mchangama https://reason.com/people/jacob-mchangama/ Jeff Kosseff https://reason.com/people/jeff-kosseff/ jkosseff@gmail.com <![CDATA[ Restricting Speech By Purportedly Protecting Children ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380273 2026-05-01T16:41:34Z 2026-05-06T13:38:39Z

While governments around the world have imposed speech restrictions to fight misinformation and hate speech, they also have attempted to curb free speech for a less controversial reason: protecting children. But many of these restrictions stem from vague, unspecified, or speculative harms and corral wide swaths of speech that do not harm children. Censoring speech in the name of protecting children is not a terribly new phenomenon, especially in authoritarian countries. In 2012, for instance, Russia's parliament passed a law allowing the country's media censorship agency to unilaterally blacklist websites and take them offline, without any court approval. The lawmakers' justification was protecting children from online harm, but civil liberties groups correctly predicted that the government would use these powers to curb far more speech. In recent years, such efforts have moved beyond authoritarian countries and taken hold in Western democracies.

The United States has seen repeated attempts to curb speech in the name of saving the children. Although they have failed, governments have continued to try over many decades. In 1969, the US Supreme Court struck down the Des Moines, Iowa, school district's ban on black armbands worn to protest the Vietnam War, writing that "state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism." In 1997, the Supreme Court invalidated much of the Communications Decency Act, which criminalized the online transmission of "indecent" content to minors, writing that the "interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship." And in 2011, the court struck down a California law that banned sales of "violent video games" to minors, writing that the First Amendment does not give the government "a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

The moral panic did not stop with those cases. Across the country, states are scrambling to address the harms associated with minors' use of social media. Many high-profile commentators and politicians have criticized social media for harming the mental health of teenagers, though there is substantial debate as to whether they have presented sufficient evidence of causation. In May 2023, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on social media and youths' mental health: "The most common question parents ask me is, 'Is social media safe for my kids?' The answer is that we don't have enough evidence to say it's safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people's mental health."

States have stepped in to try to regulate social media. Among the highest profile recent attempts is Utah's Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which the state legislature enacted in March 2024. The Utah law requires social media companies to "implement an age assurance system to determine whether a current or prospective Utah account holder on the social media company's social media service is a minor." For minors who have accounts, social media companies must impose a number of restrictions, including setting "default privacy settings to prioritize maximum privacy," limiting direct messaging abilities, disabling search engine indexing of their profiles, and limiting a minor's ability to share content with others. Those privacy settings cannot be changed without verifiable parental consent. The law also requires social media companies to disable functions that "prolong user engagement" for minors, such as autoplay functions.

The Utah law does not apply to all platforms, however. It only restricts "social media companies," which it defines as a "public website or application" that mainly displays content created by users, permits those individuals to create public accounts, allows them to "interact socially with each other," provides them with lists of other users with whom they are connected, and lets them post content that others can see. The law explicitly states that cloud storage and email is excluded from the definition of "social media company.

Why did the Utah legislature see the need to impose such limits on minors' use of social media? In its findings, the legislature discussed the negative mental health impacts of "the addictive design features of certain social media services" and asserted that the platforms "are designed without sufficient tools to allow adequate parental oversight, exposing minors to risks that could be mitigated with proper parental involvement and control." The legislature rationalized that it has "enacted safeguards around products and activities that pose risks to minors," such as medications and cars. Missing from the state's justification was the acknowledgement that unlike, say, car safety regulations, Utah's social media law involves First Amendment–protected speech. Not surprisingly, the technology trade group NetChoice, along with Utah residents, sued the state, alleging that the law violates the First Amendment.

Central to NetChoice's case was the argument that the statute's definition of "social media company" would lead to over-regulation of protected speech. "Using a vague content-, speaker-, and viewpoint-based definition of 'social media company,' the Act imposes restrictions on certain websites' ability to disseminate and facilitate the speech of their users," NetChoice wrote in its motion for a preliminary injunction blocking the law. "Yet there is a fundamental mismatch between the State's putative goals in regulating certain means of disseminating speech, and the Act's haphazard regulation of certain websites. The Act does not regulate many websites across the Internet that use the same means of disseminating speech the Act restricts, while simultaneously burdening many websites that do not use those means at all."

On September 10, 2024—less than a month before the law was set to go into effect—Utah federal judge Robert J. Shelby issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law. Speech regulations are particularly difficult to justify under the First Amendment if they are "content based." And Shelby concluded that the Utah law is content based, because it only applies to platforms that the law "singles out [as] social media companies" and does not apply to other platforms.

Content-based speech regulations survive First Amendment challenges only if they are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests. Shelby concluded that Utah fell short of making that case, writing that although he "is sensitive to the mental health challenges many young people face," the state has not "provided evidence establishing a clear, causal relationship between minors' social media use and negative mental health impacts." And even if Utah had a compelling interest, Shelby stated, the law is not narrowly tailored to advance that goal. He suggested that parents — not the government — should be the arbiters of the content their children see and share on social media: "While Defendants present evidence suggesting parental controls are not in widespread use, their evidence does not establish parental tools are deficient. It only demonstrates parents are unaware of parental controls, do not know how to use parental controls, or simply do not care to use parental controls."

Shelby also questioned the efficacy of the Utah law, noting that it "ultimately preserves minors' ability to spend as much time as they want on social media platforms." That weakens the state's argument that the act is necessary to combat excessive use of social media. Conversely, Shelby found that the law blocks far more protected speech than necessary to achieve its goals: "Specifically, Defendants have not identified why the Act's scope is not constrained to social media platforms with significant populations of minor users, or social media platforms that use the addictive features fundamental to Defendants' well-being and privacy concerns." Utah has appealed the ruling to the Tenth Circuit.

Speech restrictions in the name of child safety are not limited to the state level. Throughout 2024, members of Congress advocated for various versions of the Kids Online Safety Act, which would impose a duty of care on online platforms to "prevent and mitigate" online harms to children, with enumerated harms including eating disorders, suicide, and substance abuse. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the bill's sponsor, defended the duty of care as a standard requirement in many sectors. "Companies in every other industry in America are required to take meaningful steps to prevent users of their products from being hurt, and this simply extends that same kind of responsibility to social media companies, too," he said on his website.

But, like the Utah law, the federal proposal could cause platforms to over-censor legitimate educational materials about those topics, out of fear of liability. In a July 2024 letter to lawmakers, civil liberties groups, including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), noted the bill's free-speech problems: "One common concern among these diverse groups is the Duty of Care requirements that may cause companies to take down content to avoid liability. This could lead to aggressive filtering of content by companies preventing access to important, First Amendment–protected, educational and even lifesaving content."

Such threats to free speech are not limited to the United States. In 2023, the United Kingdom's Parliament approved the 300-page Online Safety Act, a sweeping set of mandates for online platforms. Among the most troubling, from a free-speech perspective, is a duty of care for preventing harms to children, including the vagueness of the law's requirements and the delegation of broad enforcement powers to Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator.

The duty of care is not the only concerning aspect of the UK law. It also allows Ofcom to compel platforms to search for illegal content, something that the Electronic Frontier Foundation says poses a real threat to the viability of end-to-end encryption. As the EFF wrote in 2023, "Such a backdoor scanning system can and will be exploited by bad actors. It will also produce false positives, leading to false accusations of child abuse that will have to be resolved. That's why the OSB is incompatible with end-to-end encryption—and human rights."

Another troubling aspect of the UK law is its requirement that websites verify the age of users, to block "harmful" online content from minors. As the EFF noted, "To prevent minors from accessing 'harmful' content, sites will have to verify the age of visitors, either by asking for government-issued documents or using biometric data, such as face scans, to estimate their age. This will result in an enormous shift in the availability of information online, and pose a serious threat to the privacy of UK internet users." Such invasive verification practices threaten the ability of both minors and adults to access the internet anonymously.

Because the UK Online Safety Act is still being implemented, it is unclear the full extent to which the government would use the law to censor speech. But in a November 2024 policy paper, the UK's Secretary of State for the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle indicated plans for expansive use of the new legal powers. For instance, Kyle wrote that "the growing presence of disinformation poses a unique threat to our democratic processes and to societal cohesion in the United Kingdom and must be robustly countered. Services should also remain live to emerging information threats, with the flexibility to quickly and robustly respond, and minimize the damaging effects on users, particularly vulnerable groups." Kyle did not indicate precisely how the government might work with (or pressure) platforms to deal with misinformation. Nor did he say who determines what is "disinformation" or suggest ways to counter it. That vagueness is precisely the harm that such laws have. They empower large bureaucracies to claim sweeping mandates to decide what sorts of content are too harmful to be on the internet.

Excerpted from The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff. Copyright 2026. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

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]]> Liz Wolfe https://reason.com/people/liz-wolfe/ liz.wolfe@reason.com <![CDATA[ Damned if You Do ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380549 2026-05-06T13:29:40Z 2026-05-06T13:30:23Z United States President Donald J Trump speaks before signing a proclamation inside the Oval Office at The White House in Washington, on May 5, 2026. | AdMedia/Newscom

"Below the threshold":  At a Pentagon briefing yesterday following Iran's attacks on the United Arab Emirates, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters that our adversary's actions were "below the threshold of restarting major combat operations." This shows laudable restraint; it seems the U.S. is interested in shepherding shipping vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz without being pulled back into combat, despite all of Iran's taunts. (Iran's foreign minister said "the U.S. should be wary of being dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers" and "so should the UAE." I wonder who those mysterious ill-wishers might be!)

The New York Times has warped this restraint into "White House Insists Iran War Is Over, Even While Missiles Fly"—implying that defense officials are delusional vs. choosing not to respond with maximum force to Iran's provocation. ("The White House is turning to rhetorical leaps as President Trump tries to put the biggest political crisis of his presidency behind him," writes the Times' David E. Sanger.)

President Donald Trump had said, rather clearly, that the ceasefire would be considered violated if the Strait of Hormuz were blocked. But things aren't always so binary, and sometimes you say things as part of a negotiating tactic. It's probably good that Trump has started to move away from some of his initial objectives (like regime change) and that the administration seems opposed to being dragged into a protracted conflict.

Naturally, as I was writing this, Trump went off and tweeted this. Never a dull moment, never a coherent strategy to analyze. It's possible the restraint I was lightly lauding ends up not being restraint at all, alas:

The new war on drugs: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opened up a new front in the war on drugs. No, not psychedelics—he tends to support those. The new Public Enemy No. 1 is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Yesterday, RFK Jr. announced a few federal initiatives aimed at reducing the prescription of SSRIs like  Zoloft, Lexapro, and Prozac.

About one in six American adults takes SSRIs. Women in every age group tend to be more likely than men to be SSRI users. Use (among adults) has gone up in recent years, rising from about 13 percent (2015–2018) to a little over 16 percent today. The rate of use among both teens and adults increased by almost 400 percent between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008, according to a 2011 review. That number has only risen since.

"Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer treat them as the default, we will treat them as one option, to be used when appropriate, with full transparency and with a clear path off when they are no longer needed," said Kennedy at a summit on mental health and overmedicalization. Side effects discussed by Kennedy, and long reported by users, include a numbing, dulling effect during use as well as difficulty withdrawing.

"We may take issue with this blanket 'overprescribing' hypothesis that underpins the secretary's statements," Marketa Wills, the chief executive and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, told The New York Times (rather predictably) in the wake of Kennedy's comments. "There is probably overprescribing and underprescribing in all parts of medicine, and mental health care is no different. And there are people who still can't access care at all who need it." (That last sentence is always thrown in, no matter the subject, isn't it? Like a tic.)

Interestingly, Kamala Harris' stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, went on a whole diatribe on this subject six months ago. She said she's been on antidepressants for at least the last decade, "fifteen years probably"—which would mean she started taking them at age 11, or at age 16 at the latest (if her decade calculation is more accurate). She said she worried about the lack of research done on long-term dependence and noted intense withdrawal symptoms.

You know the cultural consensus is shifting when Ella Emhoff and RFK Jr. start agreeing.

Scenes from New York: Fascinating report out from the Institute for Family Studies on how childhood independence started to disappear and what's to be done about it. Some assembled thoughts here:

QUICK HITS

  • A cruise ship that set off from Ushuaia, Argentina, to go explore Antarctica and make its way up to the Canary Islands is now implementing containment measures off the coast of Cape Verde due to the spread of hantavirus aboard the ship. Three people have died so far. This whole situation sucks not only for the people on board, some of whom are infected with hantavirus (which is gotten from rodent droppings and urine), but also for the cruise ship industry overall, which had experienced a bit of a rebound since pandemic cruise ship lockdowns.
  • How new tech is changing (ruining?) fishing and hunting. ("We're about ethical hunting," Tony Schoonen, chief executive of the Boone and Crockett Club, tells The Wall Street Journal. "And that argues for self-restraint by the hunter when it comes to technology.")
  • "The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into whether Smith College, the women's school in Northampton, Mass., violated anti-discrimination laws by allowing transgender students to enroll," reports The New York Times.
  • Labor market improving? "Employers hired 5.55 million people in March, a stunning rise of 655,000 from February," reports Axios. "In another positive sign for the job market, the quits rate ticked up, with 125,000 more Americans voluntarily leaving their jobs—a small move but a sign of greater confidence in finding work elsewhere." Still, job openings numbers dropped and layoffs surged a bit, so it's a mixed bag.
  • Delta tries penny-pinching.
  • It's happening:

  • New Ehrlich just dropped:

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]]> Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ Today in Supreme Court History: May 6, 1776 ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8329697 2025-05-08T23:49:39Z 2026-05-06T11:00:47Z 5/6/1776: Virginia Declaration of Rights by George Mason is published. Thomas Jefferson relied on this document when drafting the Declaration of Independence.

 

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]]> J.D. Tuccille https://reason.com/people/jd-tuccille/ jtuccille@gmail.com <![CDATA[ Surveillance Tools Intended for Border Control Are Being Used Against Americans ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380588 2026-05-05T19:09:00Z 2026-05-06T11:00:36Z An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent looks through papers. | Illustration: Midjourney

It goes without saying that any tool or power government acquires for addressing some crisis of the moment will eventually—often, almost immediately—be deployed against the general public. So it is with border enforcement and the crackdown on immigrants. Surveillance technology ostensibly intended for the enforcement of laws regulating migration is being turned against Americans.

'Easy Access to the Home and Workplace Addresses of American Citizens'

"In the battle against illegal immigration, the U.S. is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on tools that give federal agents easy access to the home and workplace addresses of American citizens, their social-media accounts, vehicle information, flight history, law-enforcement records and other personal information, as well as data to track their daily comings and goings," The Wall Street Journal's Shane Shifflett and Hannah Critchfield reported last week.

The article opened with the story of Liz McLellan, a Maine resident who photographed federal agents participating in an immigration crackdown. Agents went to her home and told her, "This is a warning. We know you live right here." Understandably, she took that as a threat.

In fact, McLellan was well within her rights to record federal agents. As Freedom Forum notes, "Courts have protected a general right to record law enforcement when the officers are performing official actions in a public space, such as a street or park. This right is protected under both freedom of speech as free expression and freedom of the press, which includes protection for gathering information about the government and for sharing it with others."

Federal officials complain that activists publish information about agents that may impede operations, but that's also a protected activity. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, "government officials and employees don't enjoy special immunity from 'doxxing.' To the contrary, the power they exercise makes it even more important that people be free to criticize them and disclose information that holds them accountable."

So, the feds were just trying to intimidate McLellan to get her to stop her constitutionally protected monitoring of government operations. They used capabilities acquired to combat illegal immigration to identify her and go to her home. As the Journal's Shifflett and Critchfield add, the "high-tech dragnet built to locate, track and deport people residing illegally in the U.S., allows thousands of federal agents nationwide to peruse a trove of data belonging to more than 300 million people, including citizens."

'ICE Had Access to the Driver's License Data of 3 in 4 Adults'

In a report updated last year, American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology delved into the surveillance capabilities assembled in the name of border control. As of 2022, the authors found, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "had scanned the driver's license photos of 1 in 3 adults," "had access to the driver's license data of 3 in 4 adults," "was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults," and "could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records." Further, it explained, ICE "built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies" and "spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs."

The report referenced a contract with Palantir which would "provide the government with the ability to track people's movements with 'near real-time visibility.'" According to The Wall Street Journal, that contract has since expanded to provide federal agents with the Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) phone app, which pulls from a variety of government databases to plot targeted individuals on a map.

Scanning driver's license photos is especially consequential with the deployment of the Mobile Fortify facial recognition app. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "When ICE agents or officers encounter an individual or associates of that individual, they will use the Mobile Fortify app installed on their government-issued device to take a photograph. The photograph is then sent by the application to CBP's [Customs and Border Protection] Traveler Verification Service, in ATS [redacted] as well as the Seizure and Apprehension Workflow that contains the biometric gallery of individuals for whom CBP maintains derogatory information." The app also performs contactless fingerprint checks. "CBP saves the new photographs and fingerprints, taken using Mobile Fortify…for 15 years," adds DHS.

Vast Amounts of Data Available From a Photograph of a Face

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) warns that "ICE is currently using the Mobile Fortify app in the field to identify anyone they happen to encounter and want to identify." In a letter joined by other civil liberties groups, EPIC cautions that Mobile Fortify pulls up vast amounts of data from photos. "By pointing their phone at an individual for face identification, ICE can query various databases and obtain data related to 'individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers and firearms.'"

In a case of predictable mission creep, federal agents are using Mobile Fortify not just on suspected undocumented migrants, but also against protesters like McLellan. Scanned protesters have lost TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status for travel. In itself that may not sound like a big deal, but it means the federal government is willing to identify and retaliate against people for exercising constitutionally protected rights. That can extend to more serious consequences.

Once somebody is on the government's radar, agents can target their associates. Vanderbilt Law School's Bianca Castillo reports that federal officers use a system called Penlink which "allows agents to 'geofence' a specific area and identify all cell phones within its range, thus giving ICE the ability to track the movements and locations of these phones and their owners over time." The feds use the system without seeking warrants, claiming it is a commercial database exempt from Fourth Amendment requirements. But this appears to be "in direct violation of Carpenter v. United States, in which the US Supreme Court held that mobile phone location data revealed so much about people's lives that, under the Fourth Amendment, authorities need a warrant to access it from phone companies," adds Castillo.

A Surveillance State for Purposes You Like Is Still a Surveillance State

Even committed border warriors who favor stronger enforcement of immigration rules should have qualms about the deployment of surveillance state capabilities by the government. Tools and techniques adopted for one purpose are inevitably redirected to others, as the government is doing by targeting protesters with technology originally intended for immigration control. These surveillance tools will be used by other agencies to enforce rules and laws important to future administrations.

Ultimately, there's no such thing as a single-purpose surveillance state. There's just the misuse and abuse of the government's ability to monitor and identify people who come to its attention.

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]]> Charles Oliver https://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/ <![CDATA[ Brickbat: Yes Bruh, No Bruh ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380506 2026-05-05T03:34:03Z 2026-05-06T08:00:16Z A teacher screams at a student, each of whom are seen in silhouette. | Illustration: Midjourney

Tracey Matthews, a teacher at Wonder Junior High School in West Memphis, Arkansas, was charged with aggravated assault after he choked a student. The incident started when Matthews asked the student if he had a computer, to which the student replied, "Bruh, I don't have a computer." Matthews then said, "I'm not your bruh, I'm your sir," to which the student responded, "My bad, lil bruh." Police say Matthews then grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him against a desk, and when he left the classroom, Matthews followed him into the hallway, slammed him into the wall, and choked him. The student notified the principal, who alerted law enforcement after reviewing security video of the incident.

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]]> Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/people/eugene-volokh/ <![CDATA[ Open Thread ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380524 2026-05-06T07:00:00Z 2026-05-06T07:00:00Z The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Jacob Sullum https://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/ jsullum@reason.com <![CDATA[ Trump's Responses to Kimmel and Comey Highlight His Contempt for Freedom of Speech ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380575 2026-05-05T22:20:09Z 2026-05-06T04:01:48Z Former FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump, and late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel | Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA/Christy Bowe/Zuma Press/Newscom/Hutchinsphoto/Dreamstime

Last week, President Donald Trump said late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel "should be immediately fired" for making a "really shocking" joke about him. The next day, the Justice Department charged another prominent Trump critic, former FBI Director James Comey, with committing two federal felonies by posting a photograph of seashells arranged in the sand to form the message "86 47"—a ubiquitous statement of opposition to the current president.

Those back-to-back expressions of presidential wrath underlined a striking difference between Trump and most of his predecessors. Although presidents have never enjoyed criticism, Trump is unusual in routinely and openly using the influence and power of his office to retaliate against people who say things that offend him—a habit that blatantly contradicts his avowed commitment to freedom of speech.

Trump argued that both Kimmel and Comey had threatened his life by inciting violence against him. But those claims are hard to take seriously.

During a sketch on the April 23 broadcast of his ABC show, Kimmel pretended he was hosting the White House Correspondents' Dinner. "Our first lady, Melania, is here," he said. "So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow."

The joke suggested that Trump is old and that his wife is unhappily married. However you rate the humor or tastefulness of that jibe, it indisputably qualifies as constitutionally protected speech.

Trump implied otherwise, averring that Kimmel's gag was a "despicable call to violence." That obviously is not true, and the fact that a would-be assassin tried to attack the actual White House Correspondents' Dinner two days later does not change the meaning of Kimmel's words in their original context.

Given the federal government's power to regulate broadcasters, the president's demand that ABC take Kimmel off the air cannot be lightly ignored. That much was clear last year, when Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened TV stations with fines and license revocation unless they punished Kimmel for his ill-informed comments about the man who murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The network and its affiliate stations immediately fell in line by suspending Kimmel's show—precisely the penalty that Carr had recommended. And the day after Trump complained about Kimmel's "expectant widow" joke, the FCC reminded ABC about the potential consequences of annoying the president by announcing an early review of the network's broadcast licenses, ostensibly based on concerns about "unlawful discrimination."

In Comey's case, the Justice Department is trying to imprison someone for reiterating a phrase that appears on T-shirts and bumper stickers available from major online retailers—a slogan that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche concedes "is posted constantly" without triggering federal charges. The case, which hinges on the claim that 86 means kill, defies the typical slang usage of that term and nearly 60 years of Supreme Court rulings on the "true threat" exception to the First Amendment.

Trump's reactions to Kimmel and Comey are part of a pattern. Whether he is trying to deport a foreign student for writing an op-ed piece, threatening to yank the broadcast licenses of news outlets he views as biased against him, claiming that journalism he does not like qualifies as actionable consumer fraud, suing CNN for calling his stolen-election fantasy "the Big Lie," retaliating against law firms that represent clients and causes he deplores, or attempting to imprison legislators for reminding military personnel of their well-established duty to resist unlawful orders, Trump is not shy about using government power to punish speech that irks him.

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order aimed at "restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship." The following month, Vice President J.D. Vance reiterated that commitment. "Under Donald Trump's leadership," Vance declared, "we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square."

Those words sure sound nice. It would be even nicer if Trump's actions matched them.

© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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]]> Stephen Halbrook https://reason.com/people/stephen-halbrook3/ <![CDATA[ Second Amendment Roundup: How a Fake Citation Misled Courts to Uphold "Sensitive Place" Gun Bans ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380646 2026-05-06T01:59:25Z 2026-05-06T01:59:25Z My article with the above title has now been published online by the Journal of Law & Civil Governance at Texas A&M.  The following is the Abstract:

This article concerns how a fake citation has misled courts to uphold "sensitive place" gun bans. New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen held that the Second Amendment presumptively protects conduct covered by its plain text. A state must justify its restriction by showing it to be consistent with America's historical tradition of firearm regulation. The original public understanding at the Founding is key to that question.

Post-Bruen, courts have sought to uphold restrictions that ban firearms in various "sensitive places" based on a misunderstanding of the Founding-era offense of going armed in a manner that terrorized the public.  Antonyuk v. James upheld New York's place restrictions based on its claim that Founding-era Virginia and North Carolina laws banned going armed per se in fairs and markets. However, it conceded that Virginia only prohibited going armed "in terror of the Country," but maintained that North Carolina had no such element of the offense, adding that place restrictions in the late 19th century followed the North Carolina model. That historical tradition of regulation, the Second Circuit held, justifies New York's current law.

But Antonyuk has constructed a house of cards by ignoring actual North Carolina law and mistaking a privately published book for that law. In 1792, François-Xavier Martin published A Collection of the Statutes of the Parliament of England in Force in the State of North-Carolina, which included the 1328 Statute of Northampton. Bruen commented that the Statute "has little bearing on the Second Amendment adopted in 1791," and in any event it was interpreted to apply only to going armed in a manner to terrorize others.

Antonyuk did not bother to research actual North Carolina law. In 1741, the colony of North Carolina enacted a law directing constables to arrest "all such Persons as, in your Sight, shall ride or go armed offensively"; by contrast, it further provided that "no Slave shall go armed with Gun, Sword, Club, or other Weapon." That same language was approved by an act passed in 1791 and continued to reappear in the statutes at least as late as 1855. Going armed was not a crime unless done so offensively, while going armed per se was a crime if the person was a slave.

Antonyuk further ignored North Carolina precedents. State v. Huntly recognized the common-law offense of going armed to terrify, but said that "the carrying of a gun per se constitutes no offence." That reading of the law was repeated over and over as late as 2024.

Courts have been misled by the citation of Martin's Collection as a "law" at the highest level. Dissenting in Bruen, Justice Breyer cited Martin as the authority for the proposition that "North Carolina enacted a law whose language was lifted from the Statute of Northampton virtually verbatim (vestigial references to the King included)." It boggles the imagination to think that the state would enact a law with several references to "the King" sixteen years after the Declaration of Independence.

It is unclear where the rumor started that Martin's book was a "law," but the Duke Center for Firearms Law includes it in its Repository of Historical Gun Laws under the citation "ch. 3, N.C. Gen. Stat. (Francois X. Martin 1792)." Chapter 3 of N.C. General Statutes in 1792 included no such provision. Another fake citation for this "law" that has been cited is "1792 N.C. Laws 60, 61 ch. 3," which does not exist.

The Ninth Circuit, in Wolford v. Lopez, recognized that Bruen rejected the purported place restrictions in North Carolina law, but upheld them anyway despite no Founding-era tradition of regulation. Yet the Third Circuit swallowed Antonyuk hook, line, and sinker to uphold New Jersey's extensive place bans, including the misrepresentation that Martin's book was a North Carolina "law," in Koons v. Attorney General of New Jersey. And then a different panel of the Second Circuit, in Frey v. City of New York, admitted that "Bruen undermines" Antonyuk's interpretation, but upheld other parts of New York's "sensitive place" bans despite no Founding-era tradition of regulation.

This matter is not about a single, erroneous citation with no consequence. In Antonyuk, the Second Circuit built its entire theory of Founding-era analogs on sand in order to comply with Bruen's directive to find a historical tradition of regulation that supported New York's wide restrictions. That decision has since influenced two other circuits, covering three states, to adopt the same flawed approach—and others may soon follow. These decisions are based on a badly mistaken analysis of America's historical tradition of firearm regulation and should be overturned.

[Note: The Third Circuit has granted rehearing en banc in Koons, thus vacating the panel decision.]

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]]> Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ The KBJ Delay in Callais ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380631 2026-05-05T23:06:07Z 2026-05-05T23:06:07Z One of the most explosive claims from Molly Hemmingway's new books concerns Dobbs. As we all recall, after the leak of the Dobbs draft on May 2, 2022, it became apparent that the Justices would face serious security threats. Indeed, a deranged liberal traveled from California to D.C. with weapons and made it to the threshold of Justice Kavanaugh's home. (Sounds familiar, doesn't it?) Yet, after all this happened, the Dobbs opinion was not released early. The Court held onto it until June 24. There was no obvious effort to expedite the release of the opinion. And all told, there were few changes made between the leaked draft and the final published opinion. At the time, some speculated that there might be changes to the opinion. Or perhaps the majority flipped. Yet, the five held strong. What then was the holdup?

Hemmingway reports that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer refused to expedite the release of the opinion. (This vignette comes after the leak but before the assassination attempt):

On Thursday, May 12, the justices gathered in conference to go through the circulating opinions and set the dates for their release. Justices grade the decisions based on when they will be ready for release. An "A" is for those decisions and dissents that are done, "B" for those that are almost done, and "C" for those not near completion. Dobbs was graded a "C."

The majority opinion had been done for more than three months and was waiting only for the dissents. Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat. Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome. The dissenters demurred. Gorsuch spoke up, asking for a date by which they might be done. They would not give a date.

Following the conference, Justice Elena Kagan visited Justice Stephen Breyer's office. Though he had not said he would accommodate the justices whose lives were at risk by getting out a dissent, he was the member of the liberal bloc most willing to do so. Fiercely liberal in his jurisprudence and in strong disagreement with the majority decision, he nevertheless was a gentleman and a friend to all on the Court. Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the "wall was shaking."

I'm not quite sure how stone walls were shaking, but I get the picture.

After the assassination attempt, the Justices reached something of a compromise:

The dissenting justices eventually agreed to complete their Dobbs dissent by June 1 in return for an extension to June 15 of the deadline for their majority opinions in other cases. When the dissent was finally submitted, however, it cited the decision in the high-profile Second Amendment case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which would not be released until the end of the term. The release of the Dobbs decision, therefore, was dragged out until June 24, the day after Bruen was released.

Did Dobbs have to cite Bruen? Was this just another attempt at delay? This is the sort of claim that one day will be revealed in the papers of the Justices. I hope to live long enough to see them.

For now, it seems that Justice Alito may have addressed this situation, perhaps indirectly.

Justice Alito included an unusual footnote in his Callais concurrence:

The dissent would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.*

*That constitutional question was argued and conferenced nearly seven months ago.

Why would Justice Alito write this? What difference does it make that Callais was argued in October and conferenced shortly thereafter? The implication, I think, is that the Callais dissent was slow-walked. But why would it be slow-walked? As all know, the longer the opinion would take to publish, the harder it would be for Republicans to implement the order for the 2026 midterms. I'm sure Alito's majority opinion was prepared quickly. And as I noted last week, the majority barely responds to Justice Kagan's dissent, so there was not much back-and-forth. The delay, Alito insinuates, was from the Court's liberals. And why would they delay? Perhaps Justice Kagan needed seven months to perfect three consecutive sentences that begin with the words "I dissent because." Or, there was an effort to help Democrats. Who was sacrificing principle for power?

On X, Mike Fragoso asks, "Did Mollie's book excerpt force Kagan's hand in Callais? I guess we'll never know." The Wall Street Journal likewise observes, "The footnote suggests some pique by Justice Alito about the Court's long gestation on Callais, and understandably so since Justice Jackson is accusing the majority of playing politics."

Of course, if Justice Jackson went along with these dilatory tactics, she has some chutzpah for complaining about the effort to issue the mandate forthwith. But for the KBJ delay in Callais, Louisiana could have received the judgment before the election began, an this entire dispute would amount to nothing.

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]]> Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ The Laborious KBJ ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380624 2026-05-05T22:38:31Z 2026-05-05T22:38:31Z Justice Ginsburg was known as the Notorious RBG. Notoriety was a perfect adjective for Justice Ginsburg. She was famous, but not always in a good way. She was, well, notorious. And Justice Ginsburg leaned into that edgy persona--or did the edgy persona shape Ginsburg?

For some time, I've been thinking of the right nickname for Justice Jackson. It hit me today: the Laborious KBJ. The most salient feature of her tenure is making others do more work. And that work doesn't actually serve any purpose, other than indulging Justice Jackson. She certainly isn't changing any minds on the Court, and it isn't clear she is changing any hearts outside the Court.

Consider a few data points. During oral argument, she speaks more than any other Justice by a significant number. According to Adam Feldman's analysis from March, Justice Jackson spoke more than 53,000 words from the bench this term.

The next closest totals were Justices Sotomayor and Kagan with 35,000 and 30,000, respectively.  If you total the words spoken by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Thomas and Barrett (about 48,000), you still have less than Justice Jackson alone. Or you could total the words spoken by Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (52,198) and it is still less than Justice Jackson.

Feldman measures the data in a different way. Justice Jackson had the highest share of words spoken in nine of the top ten longest arguments this term. More than 1 out of every 4 words spoken by a Justice comes from Justice Jackson.

That sort of dominance is not normal.

At least when Justice Breyer would ask questions for pages on end, it was entertaining. I now find myself skipping the audio whenever Justice Jackson starts asking a question. It just is not a good use of my time. The other Justices, alas, lack that luxury. As many reporters have observed, when Justice Jackson begins her lengthy questioning, the other Justices take deep breaths, roll their eyes, and disconnect.

Then there are Justice Jackson's solo dissents. In a number of cases, she takes a position so far to the left that not even Justices Sotomayor and Kagan want to join her. Most recently, Justice Jackson was all alone in charging the majority with partisanship (more on that dissent shortly). And that dissent compelled Justice Alito to write, on very short notice, a concurrence that called her out. Our Circuit Justice has been very busy this week.

Justice Jackson also caused waves by slow-walking emergency petitions from the First Circuit. She took a long time to even call for a response in Libby v. Fectau, where the Justices ultimately granted emergency relief. Contrast this KBJ delay with how quickly Justice Alito granted an administrative stay and called for a response with the Mifepristone case. Like I said, our Circuit Justice is on point.

The Laborious KBJ. There you go.

In the spirit of my friend Ilya Shapiro, could you imagine if Justice Kagan had Justice Srinivasan as a wingman?

The post The Laborious KBJ appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Robby Soave https://reason.com/people/robby-soave/ robby.soave@reason.com <![CDATA[ Elizabeth Warren Wrongly Implies Jeff Bezos Isn't Paying Enough Taxes ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380609 2026-05-05T21:38:11Z 2026-05-05T21:40:45Z

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is trotting out a familiar, false line of attack against Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who co-sponsored the Met Gala this year.

"If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes," she wrote on X.

What would it mean for Bezos to pay his fair share? Is his fair share more than $2.7 billion? Because that's how much he likely paid in taxes in 2024, according to Forbes.

Bezos' wealth largely consists of the stock he owns in Amazon. When he cashes in shares of stock, he pays taxes. That's how it works for everyone. It doesn't make sense to tax people based on the theoretical value of the stock they own; that would mean taxing unrealized gains, i.e., the projected value of the asset before it's sold. Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), a progressive and supporter of heavier taxation on billionaires, at one point understood that such a tax would discourage entrepreneurs from investing in their own companies and instead force them to sell off assets to private equity firms.

And what if the value of the company falls? Should the government pay back the money under such a scheme, or would an unrealized gains tax work in just one direction? This is obviously unworkable.

Moreover, the broader leftist notion—one made popular by Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)—that the rich are paying less in taxes than everyone else is simply false. The U.S. tax code is extremely progressive: Lower-income people shoulder a significantly smaller tax burden than richer Americans. For federal income tax, the vast majority of revenue—upwards of 97 percent—is raised off the top half of income earners.

It's possible to further raise taxes on rich Americans, of course. New York City and California have proposed to do just that. They may find out, however, that the wealthy can only put up with so much pain before they flee to red states. That's because the federal government is already confiscating an obscene amount of money from them.

The post Elizabeth Warren Wrongly Implies Jeff Bezos Isn't Paying Enough Taxes appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Eugene Volokh https://reason.com/people/eugene-volokh/ <![CDATA[ Vanderbilt Student's Lawsuit Over Suspension for Alleged False Accusations Can Go Forward ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380610 2026-05-05T19:38:34Z 2026-05-05T19:38:34Z From a long opinion today by Judge Waverly Crenshaw (M.D. Tenn.) in Poe v. Lowe:

Poe, a male Vanderbilt student, made social media posts about another male Vanderbilt student, Roe, and his sexual behaviors with females. [Citing court filing] showing posts by Poe's Yik Yak account, including stating that "[Roe] is a rapist" and "[Roe] slipped me a roofie this fall, but I just wasn't able to definitively proove [sic] it. When I brought it up to some of the [] brothers [from Roe's fraternity] they tried to gaslight me about it" ….

Poe was not alone—a number of posts were made about Roe by other people, including other Vanderbilt students. [Citing court filing] containing Yik Yak posts by a female Vanderbilt student, L.N., including stating that she had "personal experience" with Roe and "he is a RAPIST, that is the truth and if you don't believe it after so many girls have said it, there is nothing I can do to convince you" …. Once this came to Vanderbilt's attention, Bourgoin, Vanderbilt's Director of Student Accountability, Community Standards, and Academic Integrity, opened a disciplinary case against Poe, charging him with three violations of the Student Handbook …: disorderly conduct, harassment, and impersonating a University official or any other person….

Poe's appeal was denied by Vanderbilt's Chair of the Appellate Review Board (Lowe), and Poe was suspended for a year. Poe, who had attempted suicide after hearing of his punishment, sued Vanderbilt on various theories.

The court allowed Poe's negligence claim to go forward based on how the disciplinary outcome was reported to him:

There is no dispute that Defendants were on notice of Poe's serious mental health issues. [Citing record document] (Poe's mother emailing Bourgoin and Clapper {[Vanderbilt's] Director of Student Care Network and Student Care Coordination} that Poe "is now talking suicide We are absolutely convinced an adverse decision now will take his life"). Jamerson even testified that he had assessed Poe's suicide risk at "moderate-to-elevated." Defendants did not accommodate Poe's mother's request to move the outcome call one week. Yet, they still chose to engage in care planning with her to mitigate the risk of harm to Poe. [Citing record document] (Jamerson testifying that he "felt it was safe to move forward with adding additional precautions like having [Clapper] available to be on the [outcome] cal1, who is a licensed clinical social worker, also notifying the mom of when the date would be so that the mom was aware of when it was coming out.").

Apparently, Defendants wanted Poe to have his mother with him during the outcome call, as evidenced by the email to his mother with the target date for the meeting. Clapper also testified that when she and Bourgoin began the outcome call with Poe, she asked Poe if his mother was there. Despite Poe telling them he lied to his mother {about the scheduling of the outcome call and [told] her that it was the following day}, Bourgoin and Clapper proceeded with the outcome call.

This is evidence from which a jury could conclude that the risk that Poe would commit suicide was sufficiently foreseeable to give rise to a duty of care. Moreover, having already decided to involve Poe's mother, a jury could find that Defendants failed to exercise reasonable care by proceeding with the outcome call after learning that she was not there to support him.

The same analysis applies to the element of proximate causation. Defendants argue that Poe cannot establish causation, reasoning that his suicide attempt was not reasonably foreseeable in light of the precautionary steps they took to protect him. Critically, he "thwart[e]d one of the main aspects of their reasonable care plan" by lying to his mother about the date for the outcome call. But, again, Poe made Defendants aware at the outset of the outcome call that his mom was not with him. They proceeded anyway. There is a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether his suicide attempt was reasonably foreseeable, and summary judgment will be denied on the negligence claim….

The court also allowed Poe's Title IX selective enforcement claim to go forward:

"In a selective enforcement claim, a plaintiff essentially asserts that even if he or she did violate a university policy, the decision to initiate disciplinary proceedings or the severity of the penalty imposed was motivated by gender bias." "To prevail on his selective enforcement claim, [a plaintiff] must show that a similarly-situated member of the opposite sex was treated more favorably than the plaintiff due to his or her gender."

The comparator in this case is a female student named L.N. Defendants argue that Poe and L.N. were not similarly situated because of the differences in timing, volume, and subject matter of their posts. Poe has come forward with sufficient admissible evidence for a reasonable jury to conclude that he and L.N. were similarly situated. It is undisputed that L.N. made at least twelve posts about Roe. Her posts about Roe were very similar to Poe's—they accuse Roe of sexual misconduct. Therefore, there is a genuine dispute of material fact regarding whether Poe and L.N. were similarly situated.

The remaining elements of a selective enforcement claim are whether Poe was treated less favorably than L.N. due to gender. It is undisputed that Bourgoin knew that Poe was male and L.N. was female. There is evidence that upon learning of L.N.'s identity, including her gender, Bourgoin apparently believed the accusation that Roe raped L.N., because he wanted to report the rape to Vanderbilt's Title IX Director …. It is also undisputed that even after learning L.N.'s posts were knowingly false, she only received probation, whereas Poe was suspended for a year. Therefore, there is evidence from which a reasonable jury could conclude that gender affected Vanderbilt's decision to selectively enforce a disciplinary process against Poe….

And the court allowed much of Poe's breach of contract claim to go forward, based on alleged violations of disciplinary process rules:

The Handbook … provides that students subject to disciplinary action may "examine all information that may form the basis for corrective action." … Poe has come forward with admissible evidence that he did not have the opportunity to examine all information supporting the charges. For example, he testified that the charge sheet alleged he posted on "a single social media site." It is undisputed, however, that Vanderbilt investigated him for posting on more than "a single social media site," which was relied upon to discipline him. Likewise, Poe states that Vanderbilt never showed him the post in which he allegedly impersonated a Belmont University student….

The Handbook states that students in accountability proceedings have the opportunity "to call witnesses." … Poe has presented admissible evidence to the contrary … [that] he was unable to call as witnesses other persons who made posts about Roe. For example, his attorneys tried to gather information from Greek Rank and Yik Yak. His attorneys advised Bourgoin that they were ultimately unable to subpoena information about other posts. There is evidence that Vanderbilt, on the other hand, knew the names of those other posters and, at a minimum, this would have been information relied upon by Vanderbilt that Poe would have been entitled to receive…. There is a genuine dispute of material fact regarding whether Bourgoin denied Poe the opportunity to call witnesses by withholding witnesses' identities from Poe….

The Handbook affords students the right to an unbiased appeal if a student is found to have engaged in misconduct. In conducting the appeal, the Chair of the Appellate Review Board (Lowe) should be provided with and review "the entire record of the case," the student's appeal petition, and "all supporting information provided by the [student] petitioner … in the light most favorable to the petitioner." …

First, [Poe] argues that Lowe did not review all of the materials available to her and instead merely rubber stamped Bourgoin's decision. Poe relies on Lowe's testimony that her appellate review was limited to a "Box file" from a digital sharing platform. She could not confirm under oath that she did in fact review everything in the Box file.

Second, Poe argues that the appeal documents omitted information reflecting Bourgoin's bias against him, and this "sanitized file … infected Lowe's review." Lowe agrees that omission of information about Bourgoin's negative personal views of Poe would be problematic. Poe also relies on a text message from Bourgoin to Jamerson stating, in part, "FYI to offline context. We've had countless interactions with [Poe] from accountability, honor, and multiple title ix things           He is very unwell and not stable in my untrained assessment…." This text was "offline," meaning it was not included in Poe's disciplinary file.

Third, Poe argues that Bourgoin improperly shifted the burden of proof to Poe to prove his innocence. Lowe agreed that would be problematic. Bourgoin admits that he held Poe's inability to present evidence of other posts about Roe against Poe.

Fourth, Poe claims that Lowe erroneously found that his sanction was comparable with similarly situated students. Yet, Poe points to evidence that casts doubt on that conclusion. This includes a list of other Vanderbilt students who had similar charges and lacked disciplinary history, like Poe, but were not suspended….

In sum, each of the above create disputes of material fact [for a jury to resolve]….

But the court rejected plaintiff's defamation claim, because plaintiff didn't introduce enough evidence of damages (required for defamation under Tennessee law):

Poe's defamation claim is based on the statement in Bourgoin's March 9, 2023 letter to Roe that Poe "instigated" the harassing posts, which he argues is false because other posts about Roe preceded his. Poe claims that he was damaged by the statement because he was approached at his internship about his academic sanction, thereby suffering reputational harm. Poe also testified that the contents of Bourgoin's letter were shared with other students, making him "embarrassed to … talk to other people at Vanderbilt."

Based on the record, the Court can conclude that at least six people knew about Bourgoin's letter to Roe: Bourgoin, Roe, Roe's father, Roe's mother, Poe, and Poe's mother. Poe has not offered evidence that any of those people shared the letter with his internship employer or other students….

The court also rejected plaintiff's intentional infliction of emotional distress claim (which, like the negligence claim, was based on how the suspension decision was conveyed to him):

Defendants argue that Poe cannot claim IIED based on an email Clapper sent to Bourgoin the night before the outcome call where she stated, inter alia, "His parents better have flown there. lol safe travels!" Clapper testified that the "lol" comment was in reference to the fact that "we [Clapper and Bourgoin] were working on a Sunday trying to still coordinate details[,] … [Bourgoin] [] had to travel[,] [n]either of us had [electric] power. There was a lot that could go wrong in this situation." Defendants also point out that Poe did not see the email "until nearly a year later." Defendants argue that this email, compared to how they otherwise responded to Poe's mental health issues, does not amount to outrageous conduct.

Poe clarifies that he is not contending that Clapper's email caused him "direct distress," but rather it is "evidence of the mindset with which [Defendants] approached the delivery of a suspension to a student who they knew was suicidal and thus particularly susceptible to emotional distress." Moreover, Poe points to other record evidence of Defendants' antipathy toward him with respect to the delivery of the outcome. For example, Poe cites Jamerson's comment that he was "not overly concerned" about Poe's suicide risk after the outcome, when Clapper and Bourgoin were concerned that Poe would kill himself.

Even if Defendants' conduct is offensive, Poe has not met his high burden of coming forward with admissible evidence that it was "atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community." …

And the court also threw out Poe's claim of tortious interference with business relations, and violations of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (a disability accommodation statute).

The District Court had earlier held that Poe may not proceed under a pseudonym, but that ruling is currently on appeal.

The post Vanderbilt Student's Lawsuit Over Suspension for Alleged False Accusations Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Christian Britschgi https://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/ christian.britschgi@reason.com <![CDATA[ The People vs. CEQA ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380594 2026-05-05T19:21:44Z 2026-05-05T19:25:59Z drawing of buildings, plants and flowers, and a hand putting something in a ballot box | Illustration: Midjourney

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's issue includes stories on:

  • The major overhaul of California's development-killing environmental review law heading to the ballot.
  • Landlords and the Justice Department's wrangling over a settlement for eviction moratorium losses.
  • President Donald Trump's newfound opposition to a congressional crackdown on build-to-rent housing.

Measure To Reform California's Landmark Environmental Law Headed for the Ballot

When people identify reasons why it takes so long to build anything in California, the state's landmark environmental review law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), is typically high on the list. Come November, voters will likely be asked whether they want to significantly streamline the law's requirements.

This past week, the California Chamber of Commerce began submitting signatures to election officials to place a measure overhauling CEQA on the statewide general election ballot.

The chamber says it has collected nearly a million signatures, which is well in excess of the 546,651 it needs to qualify its initiative for the ballot.

CEQA requires government agencies to study and mitigate the environmental impacts of projects they have the discretion to approve or deny. Members of the public are empowered to sue an agency if they believe it approved a project without doing a thorough enough environmental review.

Simple though those requirements might sound, CEQA has become a vast, unpredictable area of law that can see a long list of projects, from housing to bike lanes to state college admission plans, bogged down in years of study and litigation.

The law has enabled a cynical shakedown racket whereby special interests with no real environmental objections to a project will threaten to delay it with CEQA litigation unless the sponsor provides some sought-after concession.

To reduce the burden of CEQA on building new things, the Chamber's measure would create binding timelines for CEQA reviews and lawsuits for a broadly defined list of "essential projects" that includes housing, transportation infrastructure, water projects, energy projects, wildfire mitigation projects, and more.

Reviews would have to be completed within 365 days. Lawsuits would have to be decided within another 270 days.

That's significantly faster than the yearslong average timelines of the most stringent forms of CEQA review. Subsequent CEQA litigation adds another two to five years on average to a project's timeline. In extreme cases, CEQA review can last decades.

The Chamber's measure would also change the scope of CEQA reviews from studying all "significant" environmental impacts to checking whether projects are in compliance with objective standards of existing environmental laws and regulations.

John Myers of the California Chamber of Commerce says their proposed measure is all about providing certainty to an often unpredictable and indeterminate CEQA process.

The initiative "seeks to provide clarity to the process of building the essential projects California needs," Myers tells Reason. "We're not changing a single environmental law. We are not guaranteeing that projects get built. We're simply trying to provide certainty in how projects get reviewed."

Even so, changing what is currently an amorphous "study everything" law into a checklist of regulatory compliance "would be a huge change," says Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. "Basically it ends CEQA in anything like the form we've known it."

In the past several years, the California Legislature has pared back CEQA largely by excluding certain types of projects from the law's requirements entirely. But lawmakers have been a lot more reticent to reform what CEQA requires of the projects it still covers.

For instance, last year, lawmakers approved a major CEQA exemption for urban infill housing. But a bill attempting to streamline the CEQA process for projects it still covers died in the Legislature.

"A lot of people saw last year as a huge expenditure of political capital that wouldn't be easy to repeat," says Louis Mirante of the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy group supporting the Chamber's CEQA reforms. "There are more things we should be doing to CEQA than it seems the Legislature is capable of."

Landlords and the Justice Department Discuss Compensation for Eviction Moratorium

Landlords demanding compensation for the losses inflicted on them by the federal government's illegal COVID-era eviction moratorium might have to settle for far less than they were expecting.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that property owners are in the midst of negotiating a settlement with the Department of Justice that would see them get $1.5 billion to cover the costs of the moratorium.

This is far less than the $23 billion plaintiffs had initially been asking for.

That landlords would get compensation at all for the federal moratorium was not guaranteed.

When property owners initially sued for compensation on the grounds that the moratorium was an uncompensated taking of their property, the government sought to dismiss the case.

The government paradoxically argued that because the Supreme Court had found the moratorium illegal, it hadn't been authorized by law, and therefore, Congress couldn't be held responsible for paying for it.

A federal claims court initially ruled with the government, but that decision was overturned by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The full Court of Appeals declined to rehear the case, and the federal government chose not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, setting up landlords to get paid something.

While it was widely anticipated that the $20-billion-plus settlement landlords were asking for would get negotiated down, $1.5 billion is a pretty steep discount.

That's perhaps a relief for taxpayers who'd be on the hook for paying compensation for an illegal eviction ban decided on by government officials. On the other hand, it's not a great disincentive for the government to adopt a similar moratorium during the next crisis.

Trump Cools on Senate Bill That Restricts Build-To-Rent Housing

President Donald Trump is reportedly having second thoughts about his war on large single-family landlords.

Politico reported yesterday evening that the president is displeased with a provision in the Senate-passed housing bill that requires large investors to sell off their single-family holdings, including build-to-rent housing. He almost posted about it on social media before holding off, according to Politico's sources.

If true, it's an interesting change of pace.

Up to this point, Trump has been an eager combatant in the bipartisan war on large owners of single-family homes. He issued an executive order attempting to limit their activities in the housing market early in the year and called on Congress to go further in his State of the Union address.

The Senate-passed housing bill generally bans investors from owning more than 350 homes. It does allow them to purchase homes above that threshold if they've been purpose-built as rental housing. But those rentals would have to be sold off to individual owners within seven years.

Housing supply advocates, who otherwise support the Senate's bill, have been raising the alarm about these restrictions on build-to-rent housing. They say it could destroy that sector of the housing market, which builds as much as 10 percent of new single-family homes each year.

Trump's own executive order included a more robust carveout for build-to-rent housing. Even so, the White House had endorsed the Senate bill with its additional restrictions on build-to-rent housing.

The Senate bill has been stalled in the House, where lawmakers have raised complaints about the build-to-rent provisions as well as new grant funding and the exclusion of community banking reforms that were in the initial House bill.

With the exception of the build-to-rent provisions, the Senate-passed housing bill includes a number of grant program tweaks and regulatory changes aimed at increasing housing supply.

The build-to-rent provisions arguably turn the bill into a net negative for new housing supply. If Trump were able to convince both chambers to remove large investor restrictions from the legislation, it would go a long way toward ensuring that a housing bill actually leads to more housing.

Quick Links

  • Yet another New Jersey property owner is fending off her local government's efforts to seize her land. Read some of Reason's past coverage of Garden State takings here and here.
  • Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) introduces an "unhoused persons bill of rights."
  • The New York Times has a long heave on the difficulty of reclaiming one's property once squatters move in.
  • A well-cited paper finding only a modest supply increase from upzoning turned out to be riddled with basic errors.
  • Italy's prime minister is tired of people not paying their rent.

  • Local governments in Massachusetts pull out the usual tricks to avoid state housing goals.

The post The People vs. CEQA appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Josh Blackman https://reason.com/people/josh-blackman/ <![CDATA[ NAACP Seek To Recall Callais Judgment So It Can Seek Reconsideration ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8380584 2026-05-05T17:50:57Z 2026-05-05T17:50:57Z On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Callais. That same day, the non-African American Plaintiffs asked the Court to issue the judgment immediately. This request should not have been surprising. Louisiana is in the middle of the election, and time is of the essence. Justice Alito called for a response to be filed on April 30. The NAACP filed a response. I suggested that the savvy strategic move would have been to file at the same time a motion for reconsideration. To be sure, the rules provide 25 days to file such a motion, but in a fast moving case it would have been prudent to file immediately. The NAACP did not file such a motion. Instead, the opposition stated that they were thinking about it:

The Robinson Appellants oppose Appellees' Application for expedited issuance of the Court's judgment in this matter (the "Application"). This Court should afford Appellants the opportunity to consider seeking rehearing in the ordinary course. See Supreme Court Rule 44.1 (allowing 25 days for a party to seek rehearing of any judgment of this Court).

What was there to think about? The case is on the emergency docket. There is not time for the usual 25 day period to leisurely consider the matter. Again, I think there was a strategic miscue here. The NAACP lost a race on the shadow docket. And what would the NAACP have argued in such a motion for reconsideration? It would be clear they were (to use Justice Alito's words) trying to "run out the clock." The delay is the point.

Today, the NAACP has formally asked the Court to withdraw the judgment to give the NAACP the full period to file a motion for reconsideration.

The sole basis cited in the Order for granting Appellees' Application and issuing the judgment forthwith was that "[Robinson Appellants] have not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment." However, in the second sentence of Appellants' opposition to the Application, Appellants requested "the opportunity to consider seeking rehearing." See Robinson Appellants' Response to Appellees' Application for Issuance of a Copy of the Opinion and Certified Copy of the Judgment Forthwith, at 2, No. 25A1197 (Apr. 30, 2026). In support, Appellants cited Rule 44.1, noting that it allows parties twenty-five days to seek rehearing of any judgment of this Court. Appellants intend to request rehearing in this case, and, accordingly, respectfully request that this Court recall the judgment, reconsider its order granting the Application, and deny the Application. Alternatively, Appellants respectfully ask the Court to recall the judgment and provide them fifteen days from the date of its decision in this case, or until May 14, 2026, to seek rehearing.

I think this ship has sailed. Proceedings are already ongoing in the lower court. Justice Jackson made the case for why the judgment should not be issued forthwith. No one joined her. I don't see much ground for reconsideration here.

The post NAACP Seek To Recall <i>Callais</i> Judgment So It Can Seek Reconsideration appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Michael Auslin https://reason.com/people/michael-auslin/ auslin@stanford.edu <![CDATA[ The Spirit of the Declaration, Part 1 ]]> https://reason.com/?post_type=volokh-post&p=8377636 2026-05-01T16:00:47Z 2026-05-05T17:46:51Z

[This post is excerpted from the new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).]

Though Thomas Jefferson's phrases in the Declaration of Independence remain among the most famous ever penned, America's founding document remains controversial to some, and unread by many. Famously intended by the young Jefferson to be an "expression of the American mind," the Declaration was primarily of an amalgamation of George Mason's Virginia Bill of Rights, Jefferson's draft Virginia Constitution, and Richard Henry Lee's resolution of June 11 proposing Independence. Though informed by dozens of local declarations and statements, as ably chronicled by the late Pauline Maier in her 1997 American Scripture, one might say that the Declaration grew out of the Virginia soil, seeded by the tempestuous rains of Massachusetts.

The members of the Continental Congress knew that their Declaration left much unsaid and unfinished. They had heavily edited Jefferson's draft, though they refrained from adding new sections. In what Jefferson bemoaned as "mutilations" but were really judicious edits, Congress cut about a quarter of the text before adopting the document on the morning of July 4, 1776. In truth, the Declaration was not seen as the epochal event later generations attributed to it. To the delegates in Philadelphia, that step had been taken two days earlier, on July 2, when Congress voted to separate from Great Britain, King George III, and Parliament. Moreover, the Declaration was important insofar as it paved the way for two more important moves: forming foreign alliances, primarily France and Spain, and forming some kind of confederated government to guide relations among the now sovereign States. No public readings, fireworks, or celebrations occurred on July 4, though they would break out in coming days as America's new citizens listened to the Declaration read on hastily printed broadsheets sent around the country.

By design, the Declaration avoided any discussion, or even suggestion, of the type of government the colonies should establish. Formally, that was the responsibility of Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman's committee to draft articles of confederation, which ultimately created a uniquely weak central government. The more fundamental questions of governance were to be left to the new States, eight of which would draft and adopt constitutions in 1776 alone. Indeed, for many delegates, the business of writing state constitutions was far more important than Congress's declaration. Even Thomas Jefferson would rather have been back in Williamsburg working on a constitution for Virginia, a draft of which he had already composed earlier in the year, and parts of which he now re-purposed for the declaration.

But if Jefferson and his colleagues on the Committee of Five avoided specifying what a national government should look like, in drawing up its list of twenty-eight charges against King George enumerated in the Declaration, the committee and later the Congress as a whole made clear how a just government should not act. Thus, by implication, they revealed how a government justly representing the consent of the governed should act. Only when a new, more centralized government was required would the echoes of Jefferson's charges inform the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration defined Americans as one people, but it did not declare a unitary "United States of America." It was issued in the name of thirteen united colonies, who were now "Free and Independent States." How these independent states would act in concert and what kind of nation they would form would consume their energies for the next twelve years, until the Articles of Confederation were set aside and the Constitution was ratified in 1788, giving a final form to the government of the now more fully United-States.

Though the Declaration had not specified which type of government was to be formed, all members assumed that the liberties in whose name they had rebelled could only be guaranteed in a republic. Yet that was an audacious and risky undertaking. History had shown that the unrestrained exercise of liberty by equal men had brought ruin to all republics in the past, whether Athens and Rome or Venice and the Netherlands more recently. Over time, republics fell into corruption, licentiousness, and ultimately civil war. Even the ancient Hebrew commonwealth, mandated by God and the most "perfect republic" of balanced powers, had collapsed into monarchy. Nor had any republic ever been as large as the United States, raising doubts as to its viability.

Jefferson and his colleagues did not envision trusting their liberties to a pure democracy, which John Adams later described as a form of government "arbitrary Tyrannical bloody cruel and intollera[nt]," and (as Aristotle warned) almost always leading to anarchy. If America was to avoid the failures repeated throughout history, then a particular type of republican virtue would be required in its citizens and leaders. This was the virtue of public-spiritedness and service to preserve shared liberties. Ancient writers like Tacitus and Plutarch and the Bible inspired Jefferson and his contemporaries with their lessons on the lives of men both virtuous and immoral.

The Declaration did not call for radical social equality or the leveling of all distinctions, however. Jefferson was a combination of visionary and backroom politician, and his text was similarly complex. Neither he nor his fellow delegates supported social revolution. Instead, they implicitly presumed virtuous leadership by "a few of the most wise and good," as John Adams put it in his January 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government, selected freely by their fellow citizens to defend their common liberties. In time, Jefferson would express more clearly his own views on a "natural aristocracy," but even in 1776 he believed in an idea of equality that freed a man from his family's background while assuming that the best and brightest would be the ones to use their talents on behalf of the broader body politic. It was a presumption that would be tested almost immediately.

 

The post The Spirit of the Declaration, Part 1 appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Timothy Sandefur https://reason.com/people/timothy-sandefur/ <![CDATA[ How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380571 2026-05-05T17:16:31Z 2026-05-05T17:20:52Z A drawing of George Washington sitting on a white horse while talking to two black slaves working in the field at Mount Vernon. | Nathaniel Currier/Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of "exciting domestic insurrections" among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free "all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)" who were "able and willing to bear arms" against the American revolutionaries.

Today's readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era's readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: "Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?"

What Lind overlooked was that Americans did not deny that it was self-contradictory for them to hold slaves while proclaiming liberty to be every person's birthright. On the contrary, their embarrassment over that inconsistency had been particularly glaring when Virginians drafted their Declaration of Rights in June 1776. Thomas Jefferson went even further, admitting that slaves were justified in violently rebelling against their oppressors. The thought that God's "justice cannot sleep forever" made him "tremble," he said.

But the real story of the "domestic insurrections" passage is more complicated than modern readers typically realize. The best point to begin understanding it is October 1769, when a poor man named Samuel Howell approached Jefferson, then a 26-year-old lawyer practicing in Williamsburg, to ask for help in defending his freedom against the claim that he was a slave.

Howell's great-grandfather was a black man who'd had a baby girl with a white woman. Under Virginia laws of that time, the daughter was bound to servitude until the age of 31, and during those years, she gave birth to Howell's mother. She, too, was enslaved until the age of 31, and during that time, she gave birth to Howell himself. The owner of Howell's mother and grandmother, thinking that Virginia law also rendered Howell a slave until the age of 31, then sold him.

Two Virginia laws governed Howell's situation. The first provided that if "any woman servant" or "free Christian white woman" were to "have [a] bastard child by a negro," the resulting child would be "a servant until it shall be thirty-one years of age." The second provided that if a "female mulatto…obliged to serve till the age of thirty or thirty-one years shall, during the time of her servitude, have any child…such child shall serve the master…until it shall attain the same age the mother of such child was obliged by law to serve unto." The first condemned Howell's grandmother to servitude, and his mother probably qualified as a "female mulatto." Howell was born during her period of servitude, so he too would be bound to serve until the age of 31.

Nevertheless, Jefferson agreed to argue for Howell's freedom. His anti-slavery sympathies were well known; during the 1760s, he took six "freedom cases," including Howell's, charging nothing for his services as he sought to defend the accused against the charge that they were slaves. In Howell's case, he first argued that the fact that Howell's purported owner had sold him rendered the servitude mandate void. "Bond servants" (that is, temporary as opposed to lifetime slaves) were not salable, he asserted, because they were properly classified as a kind of apprentice rather than property. The reason for the 31-year rule, he continued, was actually to ensure that the parents of illicit mixed-race children cared for them instead of abandoning them. Allowing people to sell "bond servants" would give parents a way to evade the law and escape their paternal responsibilities. And because bond servants could not be sold, the attempted sale voided Howell's bondage status and rendered him free.

It was a creative argument. But Jefferson's second argument was even more audacious. He claimed that the two statutes governed only the cases of Howell's grandmother and mother, not Howell himself. Although they might seem to apply to every succeeding generation automatically, they could not actually do so because that would violate natural law. "Under the law of nature, all men are born free," he told the court. "Everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and it is given him by the law of nature, because [it is] necessary for his own sustenance." The statute enslaving the grandmother was bad enough, but to inflict bondage on generation after generation of innocent children was untenable. And the Virginia legislature must have realized this, he added, because the very fact that it had passed the second act, specifying that children "shall be bond or free according to the conditions of their mothers," proved that lawmakers never believed that the first act would inflict slavery on every descendant of the initial liaison. "It remains for some future legislature," Jefferson concluded, "if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [slavery] to the grandchildren."

Jefferson's case was idealistic, even naive, and it did not impress the judges. When the opposing lawyer, Jefferson's mentor George Wythe, rose to present the counterargument, they waved him back into his seat. They did not need to hear what he had to say. They had already made up their minds. With a bang of the gavel, they declared that Howell would remain in servitude.

It was a humiliating lesson: Slavery's evils might be an interesting subject for coffeehouse debate, but colonial authorities were not prepared to upset a century and a half of economic policy. Still, as biographer Willard Sterne Randall observes, the Howell case marked "the first time Jefferson had spoken the words in public—'all men are born free'—six years before he wrote the Declaration…and he had said them first in the legal defense of a black slave."

American Hypocrisies, English Hypocrisies

According to the classical liberalism Jefferson embraced, all people are fundamentally individual beings, responsible for their own actions and consequently endowed with the right to direct their own lives. This quality of self-responsibility, shared by all normal adults, makes people "equal" in an important sense: None is inherently entitled to control another's actions. Nor is this inherent liberty a function of tradition or culture. It is an unavoidable feature of human life. A person's individuality and self-possession are inalienable. Slavery, by contrast, is artificial, a man-made institution that can be tested against the standards of justice and found wanting.

As the clash between America and Britain accelerated in the 1770s, Tories would be quick to accuse the revolutionaries of hypocrisy for practicing slavery while protesting in defense of their own freedom. Samuel Johnson, of dictionary fame, sneered: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" But it was not at all surprising that Americans who every day witnessed the horrors of slavery would dread, to the point of paranoia, the possibility of experiencing the same fate themselves. What is actually remarkable about the patriots is the degree of candor with which they confessed that slavery clashed with their principles. No patriot of stature ever defended the practice. And no considerable political movement in the English-speaking world had ever before condemned slavery as candidly and as often as the patriots did.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, anticipated Johnson's accusation and offered a reply in a 1770 newspaper article in which he imagined a dialogue between an American and two Britons. When the British characters call the American a hypocrite, he replies that this is unfair because "many thousands [in America] abhor the slave trade as much as [any Englishman] can do, conscientiously avoid being concerned with it, and do everything in their power to abolish it." Relatively few colonists own slaves, he continues, and it would be wrong to "stigmatize us all with that crime." Notably admitting that slavery was evil, Franklin, who, a few years later, would become president of the world's first anti-slavery society, went on to point out that the hypocrisy charge cut both ways: England "began the slave trade," and while Americans were certainly blameworthy for buying slaves, "you bring the slaves to us, and tempt us to purchase them." This rhetorical move, which Jefferson would employ in the Declaration six years later, might seem disingenuous to historians, but it's no more so than the language of today's political leaders who blame oil companies for climate change, tobacco companies for lung cancer, or fast-food companies for obesity, even though these businesses, too, merely serve consumer demand.

Worse, Franklin continued, when colonial governments tried to limit or prohibit slave importation, the imperial government "disapproved and repealed" those laws "as being prejudicial, forsooth, to the interest of the [Royal] African Company." He had in mind efforts by the assemblies of Pennsylvania in 1712, South Carolina in 1760, New Jersey in 1763, and Virginia in 1710, 1727, and 1766 to ban or restrict slave imports, all of which had been overridden by London officials. 

British policy was, indeed, to prop up the Royal African Company. In 1770, the same year Franklin published his article, King George III vetoed yet another Virginian attempt to tax slave imports, declaring that it would "prejudice and obstruct as well the commerce of this kingdom as the cultivation and improvement" of Virginia. He went further, instructing all colonial governors, "upon pain of our highest displeasure," to veto "any laws whatever…by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited or obstructed."

It was also illegal in Virginia to manumit slaves except for "meritorious services." Around the same time that he represented Howell in court, Jefferson took another quixotic step against slavery by drafting a bill to let masters free their slaves when they chose. Thinking himself too young and unknown to offer such a major proposal, he asked the respected elder legislator Richard Bland to sponsor it in the House of Burgesses. Bland agreed—and soon regretted it. When he rose to speak, other members shouted him down so ferociously that Bland dropped the subject. "He was denounced as an enemy to his country," Jefferson recalled, "and was treated with the grossest indecorum." The message was clear: Neither the royal government nor the planter class controlling the colony would tolerate outright attacks on slavery, and even modest efforts to limit it could destroy a man's political reputation.

True, efforts to limit the slave trade or allow manumission were not the same as attacking slavery in toto. But leaders who wanted to eradicate the practice itself thought the first steps must be gradual. Because the slave trade was held in such opprobrium, campaigning against it was the most political way to introduce the idea of prohibiting slavery itself.

This approach did have an element of disingenuousness, since cutting off the importation of slaves from abroad would likely increase the market value of those already in North America, thus creating an incentive to preserve slavery, rather than eradicate it. And there was another, more severe element of disingenuousness: the fact that many, including Jefferson, shared the racial prejudices that appeared to substantiate the claims of those who viewed Africans and their descendants as biologically doomed to servitude. Only a few years after independence, Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he set forth his "suspicion…that the blacks…are inferior to the whites." A later generation seized on his words to justify slavery, and although Jefferson himself denied this connection ("whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights," he said), he did conclude that biological as well as historical differences between the races made it impossible for them to live together permanently in North America.

Jefferson was one of many white Southerners who, while regarding slavery as evil, found it impossible to imagine a peaceful multiracial democracy. They knew of  no historical precedent for such a thing; the record with which the American Founders were familiar suggested that racially and religiously diverse societies could be governed only by emperors, as with Rome, or through legal segregation, as with medieval Jerusalem. No civilization known to man had ever successfully abolished slavery; history seemed instead to prove that mass emancipation led inevitably to deadly reprisals and civil war.

That was precisely what Lord Dunmore seemed to have in mind. He designed his 1775 Proclamation as a weapon of terror. It was an ancient tactic, one used in Greek and Roman times, and classically educated plantation owners were all too familiar with the numerous slave revolts in the Roman Republic, including three "servile wars" between 135 and 71 B.C. Among the most frightening precedents was the Second Servile War, sparked by the Roman Senate's decision to free 800 Bithynians who had been enslaved for debt. The Senate did this in hopes that they would join the Roman military, but it sparked a bloody uprising instead. "Calamities overspread all Sicily," wrote the historian Diodorus Siculus. Slaves "committed all sorts of rapines and acts of wickedness; for they shamefully killed all before them, whether bond or free, that none might be left to tell tales."

Virginians also knew that the people they held in chains were justified in fighting for their freedom, and that embarrassing fact made the specter of rebellion all the more chilling. "The Almighty," Jefferson wrote when contemplating the possibility, "has no attribute which can take side with [whites] in such a contest."

The Revolution as Opportunity

All these factors hovered in the background in the summer of 1776, when Jefferson began writing the Declaration of Independence. In his initial draft, he wrote that the king and his deputies were "inciting insurrections of our fellow subjects citizens with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation." This did not refer to slavery at all, but to efforts by British leaders to encourage American Loyalists or neutrals ("subjects," which Jefferson changed to "citizens") to help suppress the rebellion.

Under Britain's laws of attainder and forfeiture, rebels were liable to having their property confiscated for treason and likely bestowed on informants as a reward. Jefferson was saying that this "allurement" was designed to encourage infighting among colonists. 

Then, he had followed that allegation with a separate clause accusing the king of "prompting our negroes to rise in arms among us; those very negroes whom by an inhuman use of his negative he hath from time to time refused us permission to exclude by law." Coupling the complaint of inciting insurrection with a complaint about the monarchy's refusal to let colonists ban the slave trade cushioned the charge of hypocrisy by acknowledging slavery to be "inhuman" (again implicitly admitting that slaves who "rose in arms" were justified in doing so), while also saying that the violence and civilian casualties that would likely result from a servile war were things no worthy monarch would intentionally provoke.

In his next draft, Jefferson expanded on this point. Retaining the "treasonable insurrections" clause (regarding Loyalists), he deleted the "rise in arms" clause and replaced it with a paragraph--long accusation against the king, into which he poured more vitriol than anywhere else in the document. This indignant passage, longer than any other in the Declaration, condemned the king for fostering and maintaining slavery, using words that made the entire list of grievances seem to rise to this climax:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

This reiterated the complaint that while George III refused to veto Parliament's bills, he did veto colonial bills and completely banned laws limiting slave importation. The bottom line was clear: The king and his deputies were creating a tragically explosive situation by enslaving people to increase imperial wealth, then unleashing the victims of slavery on white Virginians to increase imperial power.

Jefferson was proud of this passage, and John Adams admired it too. Five decades later, Adams recalled that he was "delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery." The Declaration's rhetorical momentum rose from relatively minor accusations of failing to approve "wholesome" legislation to a denunciation of the king as a false Christian, a pirate who would embarrass even "infidels," and a man willing to trick slaves into murdering his subjects.

Bizarrely, recent historians have viewed this paragraph not as proof of Jefferson's anti-slavery views but as evidence of his mendacity. They contend that blaming the monarchy for slavery's presence in America was so implausible that it proves Jefferson was engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand. Joseph Ellis, for example, accused Jefferson of "juggling two incompatible formulations: One is to blame the king for slavery; the other is to blame him for emancipating the slaves." Garry Wills, too, claimed that Jefferson was "twist[ing] language and logic in an unfortunate way," and that the Virginian actually thought "the king's real crime [was] his attempt to free Virginia's slaves."

These accusations are off base. For one thing, the Dunmore proclamation did not free Virginia's slaves. It only promised freedom to slaves "appertaining to rebels" who were "able and willing to bear arms" for the king, not to anyone enslaved by a Loyalist or to women, children, the infirm, older people, or others unable to fight in the British military.

More important, although Jefferson was indeed engaged in rhetorical legerdemain, it was essentially the opposite of what Ellis, Wills, and others asserted. The political maneuver Jefferson was attempting aimed not to excuse slavery, but to damn it. Convinced that the Revolution offered a rare chance to wipe away the inherited evils of English tradition, he hoped to place Americans irrevocably on the record about slavery's evil in a way that would force them to work toward its eventual eradication.

Jefferson, Adams, and their colleagues knew the Revolution presented a special opportunity. "I wish with you that the genius of this country may expand itself, now [that] the shackles are knocked off," Adams wrote a friend in the weeks after independence. "But there is not a little danger of its becoming still more contracted. If a sufficient scope is not allowed for the human mind to exert itself…we shall become more despicably narrow, timid, selfish, base and barbarous."

Jefferson also thought the moment "for fixing every essential right on a legal basis" was now. With royal government swept away, there was nothing "to restrain us from doing right" and reforming colonial law "with a single eye to reason." He feared that "from the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill"; once independence was achieved, politicians would lose "the general pulse of reformation," and citizens would "forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money." Therefore, "the shackles…which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."

Jefferson was already planning an ambitious set of legal reforms for his home state, everything from abolishing the established church and providing for the manumission of slaves to establishing a public school system and reforming the criminal code. Now he saw another opportunity. Knowing that people are typically less willing to admit their own faults than to blame others, he hoped that by asserting the injustice of slavery in unmistakable terms while simultaneously scapegoating the king, the Declaration would make it easier for his countrymen to view the practice as un-American. They might come to believe that slavery, like an established religion or the cruel punishments of English common law, was an outworn European notion, forced on Americans more or less against their will. Later historians might quibble about this, but the creation of a social narrative is part of a statesman's job during the act of founding, that is, of consecrating. When done right, it can draw the people toward what Abraham Lincoln later called their "better angels."

The Redacted Declaration

There were good reasons to think this gambit would succeed. Public consciousness did seem to be awakening to slavery's evils. In 1785, Jefferson told a British abolitionist that Americans living north of the Chesapeake were becoming hostile to slavery because the younger generation had "sucked in the principles of liberty as it were with their mother's milk." Adams agreed. Slavery, he wrote in 1801, was "fast diminishing." Vermont banned it in 1777. Other states passed gradual anti-slavery laws, which did not liberate those already in chains but forbade new enslavement. Pennsylvania did so in 1780, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804. The Massachusetts Supreme Court declared slavery unconstitutional in 1783 on the grounds that it violated the principle "that all men are born free and equal." Meanwhile, economists, notably Adam Smith, were explaining that slavery is economically counterproductive. It therefore seemed plausible that with the right incentives, Americans might eliminate it entirely.

Of course, that was not to be. On Tuesday, July 1, 1776, the drafting committee presented the Declaration to the Continental Congress for a clause-by-clause discussion and debate, and Jefferson watched as his fellow delegates whittled away much of its latter half, entirely removing his attack on slavery. No records remain of who said what during these debates, although Jefferson recalled that Adams tirelessly defended every word in the draft, while Jefferson remained silent, as always. The "cruel war on human nature" passage was eliminated "in complaisance [sic] to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it," he wrote, as well as some Northerners, who, although holding "few slaves themselves," were "pretty considerable carriers of them to others." After deleting the paragraph, the Congress also changed the preceding clause, so that instead of denouncing the king and his governors for inciting "insurrections" by "our fellow citizens" (that is, white Loyalists), the final wording condemned him for "excit[ing] domestic insurrections," lumping together all types of internal sabotage that the British were provoking.

Watching his Declaration being edited was a maddening experience for Jefferson. When he returned to his apartment, he wrote out several painstaking copies of his original version, with marks to indicate the changes the Congress had made, and sent them to friends, asking them to agree that his initial draft was better. Fifty years later, he did the same in his memoirs. Jefferson's disappointment at the failure of his effort to embed a denunciation of slavery into the Declaration remained with him for the rest of his life.

This article is adapted from the book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence by permission of the Cato Institute.

The post How the Slaveholding Founders Really Felt About Slavery appeared first on Reason.com.

]]> Alexander Langlois https://reason.com/people/alexander-langlois/ <![CDATA[ Can We Ever Trust the Government To Be Honest About War? ]]> https://reason.com/?p=8380542 2026-05-05T16:27:48Z 2026-05-05T16:27:48Z A silhouette of Donald Trump, with the Iranian flag and the aftermath of war behind him | Credit: Jim LoScalzo-Pool via CNP/CNP/Polaris/Newscom/Zaniyar/MEI/SIPA/Newscom

For decades, the U.S. government has been willing to start wars but not strategically and transparently manage them, consistently misleading its citizenry to justify adventurism abroad. The conduct of the Trump administration in the current war with Iran is no exception. 

President Donald Trump's claims of "victory" as the war persists through a blockade and multiple troop surges without a clear win-case highlights how optics designed to mislead dictate Washington's approach to war today. This war could mark a crucial lesson and potential turning point, however, forcing the nation to come to grips with the real costs of violent conflict.

Narrative Wars at the Expense of Transparency

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks in New York City produced an initial outpouring of support. While commenters often blame President George W. Bush and his administration for ill-conceived "adventurism," a lack of honesty with the American people regarding that adventurism played an equally damaging role. Just as officials lied about a range of issues—including Baghdad's possession of weapons of mass destruction—to justify their invasion of Iraq, the Trump administration has adopted similar thinking.

Consider Trump's claims to have already achieved "regime change" in Iran; his constant declarations that the United States has achieved "victory" in the war; Hegseth's ongoing press restrictions at the Pentagon to avoid hard questions; the administration's refusal to hold public oversight hearings with the U.S. Congress; and the Department of Defense's reported slow rolling of U.S. casualty numbers. Each of these claims has proven to be an exaggeration or an outright lie.

Consider the U.S. operation to rescue two airmen shot down deep within Iranian territory in early April. Before the mission, Trump and his team had built a narrative of total air dominance over Iran, meant to assuage the public's deep skepticism of the war and substantial concern for the safety of U.S. military members across the Middle East.

Then Iran shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle, stranding two of its crew. For days, the world waited, fearing an incident reminiscent of the 1979 hostage crisis and the certain escalation that would follow. Ultimately, the United States rescued the airmen, but at the expense of additional aircraft and a public relations disaster. 

The Trump administration needed to shift the narrative. On April 6, Trump, Hegseth, and other senior U.S. officials held a press conference to tout the success of the rescue. They bragged about the infallibility of the U.S. military and the righteousness of American resolve. They did not explain just how an advanced U.S. aircraft was shot down over supposedly dominated Iranian skies by a supposedly destroyed Iranian military, nor how additional aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars met a similar fate during the rescue.

Instead of leveling with Americans, the White House leaned further into their would-be success. In the same press conference, Trump threatened to jail a journalist who leaked information about the incident in the first place, claiming an unspecified "leaker" had put U.S. national security at risk by sharing information about a second pilot who was still lost in Iran. "We're going to go to the media company that released it, and we're going to say, 'National security, give it up or go to jail,'" he proclaimed.

In another instance earlier in the war, Iran killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait who were operating a mobile command center with little to no real protection from missile and drone strikes. It took days for the government to confirm the deaths and weeks to obtain the details surrounding the incident. While the Trump administration repeatedly stressed that all American service members and citizens were safe, the reality was already known: Far too many U.S. installations across the Middle East have long been exposed to such attacks, serving as easy targets for Iran in any such conflict. Soldiers who survived the strike refuted the official explanation from Washington. 

The primary concern of the U.S. public is the well-being of Americans abroad. Fears over the safety of American troops and civilians damaged domestic support for previous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. To avoid reporting on such casualties while simultaneously rejecting congressional oversight over a war that it did not authorize is to recognize the war's limited legitimacy. 

Breaking the Cycle

Per Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump himself, the supposed aims of the war with Iran have run the gamut: destroying Iran's navy, air force, army, missiles, drones, manufacturing base, civilian infrastructure; dislodging Tehran's hold on the Strait of Hormuz and blockading its ports; fracturing the so-called Axis of Resistance constituting the backbone of the Islamic Republic's regional security architecture; regime change; and civilizational erasure.

Instead of achieving these objectives, the Trump administration's war on Iran has produced widespread civilian suffering and clear human rights violations. Thousands are dead between Iran and Lebanon alone. Energy and fertilizer prices have spiked, contributing to inflation and deeper impoverishment globally. Millions are forcibly displaced, either from losing their homes or fleeing illegal evacuation orders and the bombs that come with them. Yet the Islamic Republic and its allies remain.

Unable to achieve already unclear objectives and trapped in a quagmire of its own making, Washington has chosen destruction as the war's defining characteristic. The evolution of the war in this direction reflects the "body count" rhetoric used by the White House during the Vietnam War, in which a narrative of mass killing and destruction was believed to bolster perceptions of American victory. In reality, it only obscured the quagmire, prolonging an already lost war in a conflict with no military resolution in the first place. 

By exercising massive force against Iran in the form of collective punishment through the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the blockade, Trump believes he can force the Islamic Republic's capitulation, thus providing the "victory" he can sell at home. 

But a strategic loss cannot be defined as a win. A lie is still a lie. That victory is and will be hollow. 

The post Can We Ever Trust the Government To Be Honest About War? appeared first on Reason.com.

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